We were thought in school and at home with our parents while
growing up that we should be respectful and polite to others, and as we grow up
we learn and practice some common polite attitudes to others. We learn that we
should say "I am sorry" if we bump into someone by accident, or
"excuse me" if you are going through a crowd in the subway. But
although my parents made a good job with the manners towards other people in
the society, I do not remember anything about being polite and respectful to
myself.
What does it encompass being polite to one self? My personal
opinion about it is that the concept includes respecting your body, fulfilling
your own expectations and plans about yourself and reaching out for a better
you in any form this may present. To be more precise about these points I'd
like to put out some examples about this.
Respecting your body
Our body houses our mind, and for those who believe in it
also our soul. Our consciousness and the mere essence of our existence leaves
shielded within our body. And since our body can move on its own, we can
explore, discover and remember a incredibly vast number of things during our
life time. The respect for the body involves several things, among those
important for me is its good functioning. We are responsible to put in our body
what it needs and not what damages it, as we are equally responsible for
keeping it tuned. I remember when I had my car it was always in my best
interest to have it fined tuned so it could answer to my very slightest
command. If we expect this performance from our machines, why should we expect
different from our bodies?. "the ultimate machine" (our body) in the
end will be with us as long as there is live in it, so better to respect it for
its awesomeness and to treat it politely.
Reaching out for a better you
When we observe the animals in the nature, several things
can be observed, and among those there is the fact that animals do not try to
improve themselves outside from whatever is related to feeding themselves. In
the other hand, we human beings have in our own nature the defiance and the
purposefulness of pushing our limits in every aspect of our lives. Imagine the
first person who tried to see how high they could jump or how fast they could
swim only to find out that they could out do themselves, and they thought
"is it really it?" cannot we go higher, move faster, dive deeper?,
and I guess the answer was "there has to be more to it" and since
then until now, we have always tried to surpass ourselves and others by
extension. Beating oneself at what we every day do is a matter of discipline
and purpose, which either or in the end we end up coming short of. But as the
changes manifest themselves and we start seeing them in ourselves, we become
then believers, believers in that it might be true that this force of change
also lives inside of us. Respecting ourselves is also reaching out for
something better than we are now, "being better" has a personal and
unique definition, for some it might being faster, for others, to be able to
speak another language, whatever the case, it helps us reach out a little for
something, and that as well keep our hearts and our soul alive. After all, we
stop living only when we stop wanting something.
Fulfilling the expectations
In this last point of today I will risk repeating myself,
but anyway I'll go forth and put it out there. We all have a mental image of
how we would like to be, and I'd like to divide this image in the attitude and
looks. In the looks I would say goes how we would like to look, we of course
have an idea of how we want to be, and how we want people to perceive us.
Trying to go towards this point is another way of respecting one self, simply
because is part of our self-realization. The second part is the one of the
attitudes. How many times we have said to ourselves that we would like to be
more punctual or more attentive or a bit ruder to the people who are mean to us
at certain times. Attitude change is the hardest I guess because they are
trained behaviors that we have practiced for a long time, maybe all our lives.
No changes happens overnight, and if we learn to recognize the attitudes we are
unhappy with and work a little every day on them, I am almost certain that they
will change as times goes by.
About being polite to one self