Did you know, that when you meet a person for the first time, you blend a little bit of you in the blender from where you will pour your first impression. It is hard not to start from yourself when you judge a person, or for that matter, an object. You start, from when you are born, with labeling the world, and do you have all the labels? If you see a yellow Ferrari for the first time, you don’t think: there’s, a yellow Ferrari. You probably think: there’s a yellow car. You know car, and yellow so that’s what you use to “judge” the situation.

This is also the case when you meet people for the first time. Like with colors, character traits are limitless, but in reality you use only a small amount of the available flavors you find in real life. But no matter how many flavors you know, you use the ones you…know. When you grow up, and you start looking more and more into the world you will learn the different character traits around you. When your older you will no longer be surprised that often, you’ve seen it all: you think.

It is when you move to another culture, even if it is not that different then the one you grew up in, that you realize how wrong you are in your judgments of the people you meet. That’s at least what I hope what would happen. But there are enough people that stick to their own, and don’t postpone their judgment. I don’t want to go into to much details but just take all the different hand gestures you can find around the world as proof of what I try to say. Many gestures in our own culture can mean the opposite in an other culture. Imagine the embarrassment you have when you judge someone wrongly because of a gesture they make towards you.

The poem that inspired me today is from Day 1266.

Its the inside

of a mask

what I see

when I look at

you

I like the idea of “the inside of a mask” but its hard to conceptualize it. In the context of what I have written above I would rewrite the poem and add: Its the inside of my mask, what I see, when I look at you. But the original is more mysterious.