Ignorance, An Enemy

The Grocery Store

If ever you require a reminder of the capacity for ignorance within human beings, go to the grocery store.

I considered naming some examples here, but if you’re reading this then you likely have your own experiences with the subject, and therefore I need not bring specifically those memories to the forefront of your mind.

With this, though, comes deeper questioning of the lives other people live.

It’s my hope that we all, at one point or another, look at something like a neighborhood or a park or a grocery store and see all the people there and wonder, “There are hundreds of lives and millions upon millions of experiences and emotions and memories that exist there, side by side and often completely isolated from each other.”

It’s an exhausting thought exercise, especially if you try to formulate some of those alternate experiences for yourself. That being said, we should try to do that as often as possible.

Take the time and the energy to put yourself in your neighbor’s shoes, maybe then we’ll all be a little bit more compassionate and less ignorant toward each other.

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Circumstantial?

I often find myself being overly critical in my writing. Less tolerant, more absolute. Not just in a creative setting, but all the time.

Writing emails is where I must check myself the most, lest i fall into this trap and offend my coworkers in an otherwise harmless conversation.

Journaling is where I first noticed this problem. Is it really a problem?

In my own personal journal entries i should have the agency to be as critical as I damn well please. Who is going to read it? Even if someone did crack open one of the many journals I’ve kept to try and unearth some unearned secrets, good luck making any sense of my handwriting.

My knee-jerk reaction to why I can be so overly-critical in my writing is because i simply have more time to formulate my thoughts. I have more time to stew on certain things that i feel passionate about. Furthermore, i don’t have to do that mental dance we all have to do while in conversation: reading social cues, weighing the relationship we have for our conversation partner and determining how much of the inner self we can safely let out. Writing is one-sided, at least if you’re really letting ideas loose.