Respect Life: 9 Ways to Get it Right, Now
My 6-year-old cousin sits beside me on the couch, madly typing away on an old-fashioned calculator. She asks me, when the screen can’t handle any more digits,
What’s this number?
I answer: two million, five hundred sixty-four thousand, eight hundred twenty-three. Or something like that. I can only recall the two million for sure.
She asks, Is that a big number?
Yes, it is. And I pause, adding,
I think that’s the number of photographs your mommy and I have looked at this week.
She looks at me, not old enough to have a fully-developed number sense, or understand my stupid jokes, and goes back to her vigorous pursuit of finding an ever-bigger number with which to quiz my ever-aging brain.
It may not have been in the neighborhood of 2.5 million, but my cousin K and I poured over a tower of new and old photo albums and loose shoe-boxed pictures in the few days we spent together surrounding our grandmother’s funeral. The photographs spanned the decades of Grandma’s long life, and the shorter life of K’s mom who also passed away this year. We spent hours learning about two of the remarkable women we are proud to call mom, aunt and grandma.
Respect Life. Two words that have come to mean in recent years something very specific, but in their more literal sense encompass so much more. We pay our respects when someone dies. We pay our respects when we drop by (in non-COVID times) to visit an old family friend when we are in town. We are also gently directed by a native proverb to respect nonhuman life:
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.
As my family and I poured over the visual records of Grandma’s life, we noted her lifelong love of horses and riding them in breathtaking venues. And also her love of travel to far-flung parts of the world like Mali and New Zealand and China. She had a respect for life that put her right in the middle of it, even if it were halfway around the world or if it took her on a mule headed to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
But a journey toward respecting life doesn’t have to involve air travel or the thrill of a steep, eons-old rock face. It starts in our heads and our hearts, right from our couches, and right into our neighborhoods and communities. We respect life by:
Accepting the (nonviolent and law-abiding) choices others make that are different from our own.
Understanding that extremism exists but trying to be a moderating influence.
Embracing our differences…in religion, spirituality, cultural background and in who we love and with whom we identify.
Growing a garden or a tree.
Lift each other up and watch our community rise.
Volunteering and assisting those less fortunate.
Accepting the fallacies of other (and our own) with grace and understanding.
Holding the door for the person behind you, no matter who they are or what they look like.
Upholding the importance of racial awareness.
Repay our children for borrowing their earth (see proverb above) by teaching them to respect life, all of it. But not just to understand this as a blanket statement. But to see the world for all its various forms of life and how each is important, relevant and beautiful in its own way.
