Travel Download Our Backpacks Of Prejudice
Surely you have ever experienced that pleasant sensation and of reconciliation with life that traveling produces. And it is that when you travel, you open your mind. You become more tolerant. You are able to understand your prejudices and give them a margin to slowly undo them in the course of your new experiences.
Traveling is the most authentic way of knowing the world, but also of knowing in depth (and without veils that obstruct our view) the prejudices that we carry behind our backs. We automatically take for granted that our way of understanding life, of living it on a day-to-day basis, is the correct one. And when we travel we discover “how rare” others are, how “rare” we can be.
“What strange customs these” foreigners have! “,” Why do they do that? “,” He’s making a fool of himself … “… These are phrases that you have surely heard more than once around you, or even phrases that you yourself you have pronounced.
The biggest prejudice: “mine is correct, yours is wrong”
There is a kind of bias when interpreting this information from the outside. What is ours, what is familiar to us, what we are used to seeing and doing is “normal”. What is not part of our customs is the strange, the strange. It is as if there is a border line between right and wrong. Between the true way of doing and understanding things and the strange and nonsensical way of doing them.
To understand it better, we are going to give an example. If you are a calm and collected person, think about how you have felt at a time when an anger has challenged your capacity for self-control. Surely you have had a feeling of strangeness in your own being and at the same time of clumsiness: people who get angry little, due to lack of practice, usually do not know how to get angry.
Well, although what is familiar to us is that state of “tranquility and serenity”, the explosion, anger and rage are part of us. Our different nuances form the whole that makes us up. We cannot pretend to deny parts of ourselves that are essential just because they are not what we are used to manifesting.
Our culture shapes us, but does not determine us
When we travel something similar happens. We cannot pretend to understand only ours as a product of common sense, and that of others as a kind of nonsense catastrophe. The cultural heritage, the landscape and social environment shape the people and their customs.
The life of our environment shapes us since we are little. It is the experiences, in which we interact with people different from ourselves, we leave our usual environment, document ourselves, travel and try different routines, which make the mold imposed by genetics more flexible. To the extent that we are able to look outside with eyes of curiosity and not from prejudice, we are taking a great step on the road to tolerance.
Pretending that our way of understanding life is the only correct and meaningful one is a very limiting way of thinking and that far from enriching us it will make us poorer. A poverty of soul. Think that true wealth comes from the lessons we learn day after day in our lives. Lessons that make us more open and tolerant.
Look at life with curiosity and not from prejudice
If only we could stop looking at our navel and look beyond it. With that look of generosity and healthy curiosity. That look as a great passage to other souls, to other minds, to other forms of life. I get rid of prejudice to look at you, stranger, with open arms. With the soul ready to learn.
You will already filter the experiences. You will have time to continue building yourself as a person, with what you want and what you do not want in your life. But if you relate to the world with your eyes covered, you will not be able to see anything. Just darkness. And the darkness sometimes terrifies. If you open them, you will see the light. The light of opening to life … the light of tolerance.
