Become friends with people who aren’t your age. Hang out with people whose first language isn’t the same a yours. Get to know someone who doesn’t come from your social class. This is how you see the world. This is how you grow.
How disparate are the demographics of the people whom you call your friends?
When you are willing and desirous of befriending people heralding from different circumstances than those of your own, you awaken to a much more broad definition of humanity than whatever microcosm you were raised within.
The opportunity to get to know people with varying beliefs and ideologies gives us ample opportunity to awaken to a much broader picture of what our lives can potentially blossom into, regardless of the enormous differences between us and those with whom we come in contact, and then ultimately befriend.
When we are exposed to diversity, and given ample opportunity to embrace those differences in order that we might learn, and thereby grow in the process, we are truly enriching our own lives, in numerous ways.
Sometimes, the opportunity to see things through a filter that is uncommon to us, gives us great room to mature in categories that we might not have initially projected on our internal map of the growth we would expect to experience over the course of our lifetime.
In our ability to clearly see how, and why, people see the world differently, we are afforded a great and most valuable chance to learn more about ourselves, while we are busy assimilating data on others.
This particular growth sneaks in through back corridors of our life experiences, and in the course of those moments, we are granted the privilege of understanding alternate qualities about the world we live in. Qualities which we might never have experienced, first person, had we not expanded our horizons in the course of fraternizing with others who are vastly disparate from us in culture, age or perspectives on life.
There is nothing to say that we must wholeheartedly agree with everything which we are becoming exposed to in this process, but along the way, we are very likely to discover how, and why, we ourselves are choosing to view things, as well as potentially recognize, the source of how and why we view those variables the way that we do, simply by exposing ourselves to people and experiences substantively different than majority of anything we had encountered prior.
If more people on planet earth were willing to embrace this simple ideology, we would unquestionably recognize a significant decrease in xenophobia and similar ignorant, fear-based perceptions about life.
Go out on a limb and befriend someone entirely different than yourself and see how that limited exposure is capable of your overall awareness in categories you might not at first have identified.
Happy Monday!
Brian Weiner 