One focus of my writing over the last year has been on the way people treat each other. The way we act towards and interact with others. Not only our behavior, but our entire conduct, attitude, demeanor, and actions. Do we treat others properly and with respect? Are we honest? Kind? Sincere? Do we follow the Golden Rule? Do we follow the Waiter Rule?
In short: Is our behavior towards others ethical?
And also, how should we deal with unethical behavior? Of course we should forgive mistakes. But surely remorse is a prerequisite for forgiveness. So how should we deal with ongoing, and perhaps even willfully unacknowledged bad behavior?
For my own clarity, I want to group these posts together. I thought about simply labeling them: Decency, or maybe decorum or propriety. Or including them with: Grace. But I seem to write more often about the dereliction of these qualities. Going forward, hopefully that will change.
So searching for a more neutral term, I will label these posts: Comportment.
Oxford English Dictionary:
comportment, noun
Personal bearing, carriage, demeanor, deportment; behavior, outward conduct, course of action.And to be fully clear, I mean comportment towards others, both ethical and unethical, moral and immoral, decent and lacking decency. Demonstrations of goodwill and malevolence and indifference; the well-considered and the ill-considered, the thoughtful and the thoughtless, the graceful and the graceless, etc.
But I think what makes comportment most interesting to me is this: How we comport ourselves is a choice. We all choose how to behave. Never forget that.
