That’s just who I am, deal with it!

In my childhood I feared the darkness. Whenever I was sent for something in a dark room I’d stand in the corridor for a while and go back to say I haven’t found what I was sent for. I don’t know why my parents still continued to send me, maybe to build my courage? It didn’t help much; I was still a slave to imaginary monsters that exist in the dark for some time.

My adulthood has brought a new challenge. Now it doesn’t exist in my imagination but lives among us. It comes in all races, genders, tribes and cultures. Fundamentalism is the darkness that brings fear when I think of the society. I feared it more especially when this weakness of character started to show itself in me.

I believe human beings are always on a journey of learning and unlearning ideas, principles and behaviour. It is dangerous when one believes they have reached the limits of enlightenment. Listening to others becomes a problem where one is clogged up with a false thinking that they understand everything better and like a clogged sewer, when it explodes all the filth is exposed.

The most common type is religious fundamentalism, witnessed through terror groups like the Al Shabaab, individuals like the man who shot innocent worshippers in a mosque and the Pharisees who led an innocent Jesus to the cross. These individuals get their motivation from religion, there problem not being that they don’t know the teachings but that they have a wrong perspective and will not allow it to be questioned.

We overlook the other types of fundamentalisms that make us hold on to poor habits that we learned from our parents or childhood or misconceptions that were passed down to us from individuals who were misinformed. You may find yourself getting into relationships in your adulthood, finding it difficult to maintain friendships because of ‘toxic’ traits. Some people identify their issues and work on change while some say, ‘that’s just who I am, deal with it!’

The frontal lobe, the part of our brain that deals with reason and judgement fully develops between 25-30 years. Meaning it is hard to change the ideas that we have grown up knowing as our truths in our adulthood. This however does not mean that it is impossible to change. That we can’t weigh what we know to what we are learning each and every day. We may have grown up when women were treated as ‘mules’ that does not mean we can’t unlearn that and treat them fairly.

Listening is one of the tools we can use to make ourselves better individuals. Sounds easy but sometimes we don’t listen and when we do we chose only to listen to people who agree with our thinking or listen to the parts that we want to use against someone, usually during an agreement. We end up missing on points that we would have meditated on to improve how we interact with a loved one, or even a stranger at a banking hall.

Humans make mistakes and it would be irresponsible to think our accumulated experience and knowledge is unquestionable. We are lucky that we have people who have made mistakes and have documented how they made good of the situation. You can’t have a mentor in every aspect of your life but you can get a book that gives you guidance in different aspects of your life.

We should stand for something, not carried away by every opinion. What we can try to do is critically thinking about everything we hear and read so we can see what areas we should adjust or areas we will retain our ideas. There is no perfect formula to tolerance, we live in an imperfect world but we can definitely work at it.