There is so much good in the world and so much to learn every day if only we would listen. It is rarer than we would probably like to admit. We do a lot of talking at each other, but with our one mouth flapping, we don’t utilize the two ears we were given often enough.
I’m not sure why but we want the world to be like we perceive it. We don’t want there to be surprises and we want other people to respond the way we think things are supposed to be. But we didn’t create the world. We only create the world inside our mind and it is important that the real world resides precisely there.
We only see what we want to see. Not in a bad way but our history and personality gravitates and observes things we are accustomed to observing. I teach teens for example and I have not seen them change much in twenty years. The world around them has and they respond differently to their environment now, but at the core, who they are and what they care about has remained the same. As a matter of fact I am beginning to see students sit in front of me that I swear I have taught before, but I know that I haven’t
We have much to learn from anybody if we choose to do so.
There is so much more to be learned from someone different than from someone that is the same. Diversity is far more exciting than sameness, yet we are all running around once again this Christmas season doing things we’ve always done. Caring about things we’ve always cared about and some of us don’t stop or see those who are no longer smiling.
Even when we want to help we put our effort into making sure that poor children have a gift to open this Christmas or that people without food have a wonderful meal on Christmas Day. And let me say for the record that we should. We absolutely should, but what about the lonely? What about the people who just need a conversation? We can’t forget about them either. Nor about the people who are always getting into some kind of verbal fight all over social media.
We need to remember all of them because it is through them that we have so much to learn.
Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@atharva_tulsi
