Toleration can be an awkward exercise. It suggests a
challenge to being fully integrative. It suggests an unelected pathway of having
to humor another. It suggests that one is (or at least feels, however uncomfortably)
‘superior’. Yet in the long progress of being ‘fully human’, being tolerant
might at best incorporate the practices of compassion, consideration, care, and
co-operation. Still, being there, something or other too easily can upset one
off track.
Such are the cracks in the tracks of our contact with others. Are you herewith included? Did we journey a relatively short while in the same train-compartment, and then you, or I, got off at a given station, and went on our individual way?
The trainset on my plywood table goes round, and round. It usually obeys such power as I feed it. But occasionally, with the disuse of time, or because of the over-long interval in which I focused on another activity, the trains dislocate, stop up, or refuse to budge. Always, it takes quite some careful sleuthing to determine the problem’s cause.
Are we at such a disconnect? Has it been too long since we gave power to our words, or gave continuity to our correspondence? Did either of us disembark, deplane, or detrain? The stations in our lives naturally involve new journeys. Details, foreign to another, take up much of our time and energy; the limitations in our sharing increases; we feel the disconnect becoming natural, non-affected, and sensibly tolerated. (Besides, one grows tired of talking just about Things; or just about Other People; and even one’s ‘wayward’ Ideas can simply become too frustrating to accommodate.)
Imprecision, quite unlike myself, is not tolerated by my trainset. Even the tiniest hair-crack in the connection points of the rails can freeze up the train’s motion. But we humans are not like that. We can accidentally reconnect with a wave, a word, a smile, or an intentional handshake. And like some strangers on a journey, we can even resume our old intercourse without the hiccup of an utter disconnect, at times sharing such intimacies of personal information as can take oneself by surprise.
We are connected. Despite all our discord and fragmentation and warmongering; despite all the Faustian pharmaceutical fallacies and their commercial iniquities; despite our ‘Territorial Imperative,’ (with its investment in our Identity; our need for Stimulation; and our want of Security,) * we cannot escape our essential inter-dependence. Our molecular osmosis is felt in the soul. At least, it is felt by those of us who are not too embroiled in an existential intolerance of others, such that our own pathways disallow the psychic current of our ‘entelechic’ energy to keep us evolving.
Unlike the relatively flat metaphor of a toy-train-set on a plywood board, the analogy of one’s place within the larger sphere of our observed universe is indeed multidimensional. It is that very multiplicity of advents, opportunities, perspectives, choices, and proclivities that impels us as individuals to make decisions for which we bear consequence, good, or bad. We are not ineluctably yoked to each other on a train-track, nor even collectively (anymore) societally mandated to 1st, 2nd, or 3rd class conveyances for the rest of our lives. We are free to interrelate.
Tolerance, practiced with care, does much for us all.
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*See: Ardrey, R. The Territorial Imperative. Athenium,
New York. (1966)
