Parents must live it. Children learn by watching their parents. The journey towards tolerance begins when we recognize and try to heal the intolerance in ourselves. Change begins when we look at ourselves in the mirror and tell the truth about what we see. If our goal is to guide our children towards lives of tolerance, we must first recognize the intolerance that shapes our own lives.
Tolerance is the ability to let people be who they are.
It sounds simple, but we expect the world to operate as we want it to, people to act as we want them to act, and ourselves to become the people we imagine we are. Our first act of tolerance must be to admit that people fall short of our expectations. We fall short of our dreams. Accepting the ambiguities of our nature and the disorder of our world without resentment or fear is one of the challenges of tolerance. To do these things require enormous courage, honesty, and above all, a sense of personal security emotional resources that in many of us are frail at best.