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Doc Adams is on the way home to enjoy lunch with his wife, Lou. He gets stopped by Mrs Malloy, who wants doc to stop in at her studio to enjoy her theatrical students. The uppity Mrs Malloy drags doc to witness an example of her student recitals.
When he enters the scene, Frank Malloy is the recipient of a tyrade from his wife, and doc is dragged into the verbal lashing as a witness to the dirty laundry being aired. Using the words from her own play, and a poem on tollerance, she breaks down when she is shown her one sided perspective.
With his work done, doc slips out. Has Mrs Malloy learned her lesson? Will Frank be able to tell his side of the story that caused her outrage?
Note: This is one episode that I have to roll my eyes at every time I hear it. Tollerance is such a buzz word, today, and back in the 1930’s as well. It’s an easy word to substitute, but the real attitude is one of patience. Even allowance would be better to convey the spirit of lovingkindness and forgiving behavior that people think they want.
Tollerance is a technical word. It implies that at any given time that some things will be within specification, and others will not. To have one without the other is useless. Tollerance is a filter to get rid of faulty parts, and keep the valuable and useable ones. If we allow all to be unfiltered by the intollerance, then therre’s no gauge of what’s in spec and what’s trash. Do you seriously want tollerance? Then you have to be willing to understand that it could be your own behavior that is out of spec. Still want to be valuable and usable? Be willing to change to meet the specification.
Allowance can stretch what is allowed, to fall under the realm of tollerance, but allowance can only be stretched so far, before the trash parts get plugged back into the big machine. A faulty or inadequate part makes the machine unusable. It could also be that the part is OK, but trying to fit in to the wrong part of the machine.
People aren’t machines. Tollerance is such an incorrect word. An old English word, longsuffering would be a better one. Suffering doesn’t mean pain, it means to allow. It is the attitude of stretching what is allowed under tollerance. Better yet is to have lovingkindness and forgiveness.
Try to be like doc in the story. He was selfless in giving up his lunch time with his wife. He was gracious in letting the selfish person have her way. He was observant at both what she wanted him to see, the play, and her misinformed reaction to her husband. He used lovingkindness and tact to prresent her with a mirror that she could see herself in.
Bottom line: If you still want to use the term, tollerance, go ahead. If you want results in battling it, don’t respond with an equally ugly attitude. Be selfless, observant, patient, loving, and try to find that tactful mirror for the other person to see their own ugliness.
