Driving in Sicily recently I was struck by the seemingly infinite tolerance that was present on the, to me, deeply chaotic roads and how the drivers didn’t seem to flinch when someone pulled out in front of them unexpectedly and without warning. They certainly rarely used the car horn or rude gestures at the other driver. You’d imagine this would lead to calm driving and a joyful experience. Well that depends.
What I started to discover is that there is a system and everyone (apart from me – at least at the start) knew the system. To me it was utter chaos (akin to Delhi traffic – you’ll understand if you’ve been there) with vehicles, motorcyclists, pedestrians all using the road as their own personal space and yet somehow accommodating each other. They all seemed to know that it would be this way and that what to me was unexpected and in fact rude and dangerous, was just their way of moving about. And if there was a close shave or something particularly ‘unacceptable’ (though that line was pretty wide) then everyone was still smiling – or at least seemed calm and nonchalant and in my imagination, all added to the Sicilian way of life – easy going, accepting and tolerant.
This got me thinking more about the quality of tolerance, a quality I’m working on in terms of accepting that others may be, and do, things differently to me – something with which I get regular ‘workshop’ opportunities to self-develop as I travel around in the world.
It’s easy to tolerate what is ‘acceptable’ to you – maybe because it’s familiar or matches your own standards and values or way of thinking and being in the world. That’s the easy part. But what about when there are differences. How does tolerance show up then? Well as we know just by looking at our world today and in our own back yards – families, organisations and so on, tolerance can often be absent.
Tolerance is a quality that comes from the heart – meaning we need to be able to open our hearts and accept difference – really accept it. Slow down on being quick to assess and judge just because it doesn’t immediately match our own worldview. If we open through the heart, we can become curious and maybe even appreciative. We might even go one step forward and try something completely different on for size – a behaviour, a point of view, a new system – actively looking for the value and quality that sits within it. It doesn’t mean we have to stay in that forever but by opening up to the possibility of some level of appreciation, we also open up to tolerance.
Why does tolerance matter? It’s a one of a number of qualities that creates expansion not contraction – it expands our worldview, it is inclusive (even if we don’t choose to be or live like the other), it provides a baseline for unity. Not uniformity, but true unity where we can accept the diversity of all and find a higher point of union.
Tolerance can often feel somewhat grudging – almost a sense of ‘OK if I have to, I can tolerate this’ – and yet in truth, done well it is transformative. It opens us to a deeper sense of willingness to cooperate with others and something bigger than our own worldview, to practice patience and acceptance.
Once these elements are in place, we then create a new ‘system’ where there is space for everyone. So, back to the roads in Sicily – it turns out that even when it seems like there is no space left on the
road for yet another car, person, bike to be part of the (chaotic) flow, with a little patience, willingness, calm and tolerance, indeed there is truly space for everyone to be.
Applying that to leadership and organisations could open a whole new way of being with each other – instead of neatly ordered ‘systems’ designed to suit those with more linear systemic worldviews, what if we entered the flow of emergence and more ‘random’ flow…perhaps creativity would grow in ways we could never predict.