Traveling Unloads Our Backpacks Of Prejudices
Surely you’ve never experienced that feeling so pleasant and reconciled with life that travels feel like. It’s that when you travel, you open your mind, become more tolerant, are able to understand your prejudices and give them a chance to undo them slowly, with the passage of your new experiences.
Traveling is the most authentic way of getting to know the world, but also of getting to know in depth (and without blindfolding) the prejudice that we carry on our backs. We automatically believe that our way of understanding life, of living our daily lives, is correct. And when we travel, we discover that others are “weird”, and how “weird” we can be.
“What strange customs these ‘foreigners’ have! Why do they do this? They’re doing it wrong…” These are phrases that you’ve certainly heard around you more than once, or maybe they’re phrases that you’ve uttered yourself.
The biggest prejudice: “mine is correct, yours incorrect”
kind of slope when interpreting this information looking from the outside. Ours, what is familiar to us, what we are used to seeing and doing is “the normal”. What is not part of our customs is weird, weird. It’s like there’s a boundary line between right and wrong. Between the true way of doing and understanding things and the strange and meaningless way of doing it.
To better understand, let’s look at an example. If you are a calm and serene person, think about how you felt at some angry moment when you lost your ability to control yourself. Surely you had a strange feeling in your own being and a certain clumsiness: people who are rarely angry, for lack of practice, usually don’t know how to be angry.
Well, even though what is familiar to us is this state of “tranquility and serenity”, the explosion, anger and fury are part of us. Our different nuances shape everything that shapes us. We cannot deny parts of ourselves that are essential just because they are not what we are used to manifesting.
Our culture shapes us, but it doesn’t define us
Traveling causes something similar to happen. We cannot try to understand our environment as solely a product of common sense, and the environment of others as a meaningless catastrophe. The cultural heritage, the landscape and the social environment create people and their customs.
Our surroundings mold us since we were little. It’s the experiences, how we relate to people who are different from us. When we leave our usual surroundings, travel and experiment with different routines, this makes the mold imposed by genetics more flexible. As we are able to look abroad with eyes of curiosity and not prejudice, we are taking a big step on the path of tolerance.
Believing that our way of understanding life is the only correct and meaningful way of thinking is a very limited way of thinking that is far from enriching us, and that will even make us poorer. A poverty of soul. We have to think that true wealth comes from the lessons we learn day after day that we live. Lessons that make us more open and tolerant.
Look at life with curiosity, not prejudice
navel and
You will filter the experiences, you will have time to continue building yourself as a person, with what you want and what you don’t want in your life. But if you relate to the world with your eyes closed, you can’t see anything, just darkness, and darkness sometimes buries you. If you open your eyes, you will see the light. The light of life’s opening… the light of tolerance.
