Learning chinese

I started learning Chinese at a very young age. My dad couldn't read or write Chinese so he decided to send me to learn Chinese instead. Learning the stroke order and stroke type was hard work. Then it seemed such a waste of time to me. I did not have the vision to see beyond the strokes and hard work. However, now after meeting many people from different cultures I have begun to value what I was given then.

I was chatting with two friends recently. They started pointing at some Chinese characters on a piece of paper and asking me to explain their meanings. The first word was 'tolerate' and the second word was 'righteous'. I explained as best as I could. My friends were Europeans and to them the characters meant nothing, they might as well have been abstract pictures. I had to be creative in illustrating the Chinese characters visually. These are some of the images which came to my mind at that time... (See image below).

This image shows the Chinese character of 'Tolerance'. The visual description is of a blade plunged into a heart. To me the character symbolises more of suppression rather than of tolerance, and for many years, I took tolerance and suppression to mean the same thing. Only after years of self-discovery have I came to understand that tolerance is not suppression. I suppressed many things which ended up in 'volcanic' eruptions of emotions later. It is out of love though that we tolerate - love for myself and love for others. When I am in love I don't even notice other’s funny habits and their personality traits do not annoy me. This is what tolerance is about. Tolerance is love and love is tolerance. Both go hand in hand.

This image shows the Chinese character of 'Righteous'. The straight lines which form the character seem to symbolise order and integrity. To me righteousness is not about ‘doing the right thing,’ as sometimes when I have done what I thought was the right thing I have later found that it was mixed up with the influence of others' opinions or my ego or my stubbornness. Righteousness is about acting from a space of absolute truth. So what is my truth?

Anyone out there who have a similar way of playing with words and characters?