You never really know what life’s going to throw at you. You never know until you live and find out. Whether life throws us cotton candy or the stick it is made on—lessons will be learned from the way we react.
To a great extent, humans are shaped by their experiences. In this issue we have several people sharing their experiences, from their time doing field work with the Leadership Institute to coaching hockey to recovering from car accidents!
We also have people sharing their opinions on such things as gun laws, minimum wage increases, and even on rap music. Each individual is writing what they believe, largely due to how they have experienced life.
I know that the tendency to gossip, or talk negatively about others is something that is a part of our fallen nature as human beings. We must acknowledge our own imperfections, and in doing so, be sentient to the imperfections in others.
In the spirit of Lent, I am trying to make that motto or way of life more integrated into the way I live on a daily basis. Just like life, humans are full of surprises and you can never assume you know a person, especially when meeting them for the first time. I have learned this, as many do, throughout my life, but when you are in college setting, I believe it’s easy to get insulated in one’s own biases and insular world-view.
What I mean is that you meet many people, from very diverse backgrounds, places, religions, families, and social settings. I have found first-hand, that many times I am wrong in my initial judgment of individual characters. Thus, I tend not to judge people as hastily or at least not to categorize them as much as my mind naturally did before I found out how wrong I could be in some cases.
Taking time to see where a person is coming from and why they act the way they do is the best way to avoid being upset with them, gossiping about them, or wasting your time in irritation over their differences, their quirks, or their seeming lack of understanding that you know only “too well.”
I hope I can continue to grow from listening not only to what people say, seeing their actions, and hearing stories about them—but by acknowledging that there is a past behind every person and a reason behind every action and a lesson to be learned in every encounter.
Thus, I think whether we are handed a snow day or a regular day of classes, a introvert, an extravert, or an I-am-still-trying-to-understand-vert, we have the option to listen to what they say—but also to learn from them, by taking into account where they have come from. We might not love them, we might be mad about their lifestyle, or maybe we simply dislike the way they carry themselves. Yet, life is too short to go about gabbing on about other people’s lives when we could simply learn from them; not everyone has experienced what we have, nor have we gone through what they have.
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