Cultivating Humilty

In a world that asks us to take sides and make choices, it is easy to reduce everything to us and them, me and you. We position ourselves on one side of a line that we drew in the sand long ago but then forgot that we ever did, and we look outwards, always looking at the "them," that which we don't believe to be ourselves. It is the unfortunate reality, though, that our ability to understand the world in terms of "us and them" or "me and you" is more often the inability to looker deeper within ourselves, and see us in them, myself in you. When we do this, the line in the sand is dissolved with the shuffling of feet walking back and forth, people talking with one another and shaking hands.

When we believe things so strongly, things that seem so good, it is hard to take the tempered perspective, to look within and see the world outside more clearly. Instead, the passion of deep conviction more often spurs us towards a rhetoric that posits sides in opposition to one another. This present election season is an obvious example of this. However, even outside the spotlights and soundbytes, there is this tendency still. Within the service-learning community there can be a tendency to see the action of volunteering as inferior to that of service-learning, and the proponents of each perspective and practice stand on opposite lines arguing with one another. But if we take a moment, we stop and realize that human beings are never so well ordered as to do anything so consistently. Service-learners are never just service-learners, but rather there are times when what they are doing is much more akin to volunteering, and vice versa. Concepts and practices of volunteering and service learning do not lie on opposite sides, but rather collide and wrestle with one another in a single person. I recognize that I, myself, am one of these people, never perfectly consistent in all that I do and say.