Life lessons #524

You know how sometimes you’ve been told a certain teaching or experience, yet you don’t really understand until one day you were put into a similar situation? Or sometimes you thought you understood something intellectually or ‘rationally,’ yet it doesn’t really resonate within you until you’ve actually experienced it? I think those are called life lessons.

No matter how much you are willing to try to listen or to rationalize or to emphasize, you have to be in someone’s shoes (a few sizes smaller or bigger) to truly understand.

At the same time, the ability to imagine, and thus identify with, is truly invaluable and irreplaceable. As J.K. Rowling eloquently explained in this lecture.

I want to develop both of these abilities: to Understand and to Imagine.

***

One small, but powerful, lesson I am learning over the short time I’ve spent abroad is that people are people.

From the surface, it seems simple. We all (generally) have features that we identify as humans – a brain, our DNA, emotions, or tendencies to socialize.

Yet, it’s surprisingly easy to forget this simple truth when faced with unfamiliar cultures or situations. It’s surprisingly easy to lump everyone different into categories and then stereotype them as “irrational” or “unable to understand.” At least it takes less effort than digging deep into their stories, their worldview, and our own hypocrisies.

It takes significantly more will power to remember that people are people, and will always behave according to our basic ‘human-ness’ and how our surroundings – the environment, the systems – shape us. Of course, there are outliers who behave differently despite of circumstance. In general, however, chanting the people are people mantra, and refusing to buy into the “irrationality of the other,” will help us communicate better with the world. (After all, we’re all irrational at one time or another.)

Navigating the world as if everything is new and yet un-categorized will take a lot more energy. It’s worth it, though, in my humble opinion.