She asks me to kill the spider.
Instead, I get the most peaceful weapons I can find.
I take a cup and a napkin,
I catch the spider, put it outside and allow it to walk away.
If I am ever caught in the wrong place
at the wrong time, just being alive,
and not bothering anyone...
I hope I am greeted with
the same kind of mercy.
–Rudy Francisco
We are all born with an innate instinct to fear things, animals, insects and especially people and cultures we don’t know or understand.
“What we don’t understand, we fear. What we fear, we judge as evil. What we judge as evil, we attempt to control. And what we cannot control…we attack.”– Unknown.
It seems now we fear a great many things.
Left, right, communists, socialists, working class, corporations, technology, government, women, men, Christians, Muslims, black, brown, white.
The list goes on and on.
The solution isn’t easy, requires work, and requires self-examination and mindfulness-based awareness. It requires acknowledging your fear and bias is based on a lack of understanding.
Self-examination, mindfulness-based awareness and compassion helps disrupt automatic, biased ways of thinking. The practices also help victims of stereotype or bias repair their sense of woundedness and increase their sense of belonging and interconnectedness.
Just as we are born with an innate sense of fear, we are equally born with an innate curiosity and sense of wonder which serves to counter our fears so that we may fully enjoy this beautiful world.
We have to stop saying we have no idea what it’s like to be in the shoes of another’s humanity. We have the ability to imagine it. We simply choose not to because it’s soul crushing.
We live in a time with unprecedented access to information, people, and cultures. We are not going to find the solution in a leader. It’s up to each of us to make our own worlds smaller and less scary by strengthening our empathy and compassion for all that we fear or don’t understand.
