By Kristine Olivas, LMFT
I lived in Germany for the first 10 years of my life and recall the German neighborhood next to our small military community divided by only a 4' chain link fence. This served as the only separation between our vastly different cultures. I loved walking over to the German playground and playing on their unique merry go round. The children in that community would play with me & we shared that common language of "play" as children naturally do.
Then one day, I noticed that when the German kids came to our playground some American boys would get aggressive and chase off the German kids. Pretty soon, I was no longer welcome on the German playground. The boys continued with their mini wars until they had ceremoniously "marked" their territory as off limits.
As I look back on this, I realize how easy it is to construct walls that divide us. Once that wall is up, it is almost a natural reaction to see each other's differences as wrong and to want to make them wrong. It’s as if differences are wrong and anyone who is different is then wrong. It is a natural and automatic practice to assess things and determine if it is “right or wrong”.
How often do you think we all judge someone in a day? Fat/skinny, pretty/ugly, smart/stupid it goes on and on. Most of us don't realize how fast we make an assessment of a new person. How many times have we said, "She’s stuck up" only to find out later she's painfully shy. Or to think someone is an idiot and then once we get to know the person, find out they had a terrible day the day we met them. Giving people chances to show all of who they are is very hard to do. But the truth is that human beings are actually very complex and we all have different parts of us that come out depending on circumstances.
We all are struggling on this planet to find our way and whether you believe it or not, we all need each other. If you took a chance today and brought your wall down, how might your life be positively influenced? I often wonder about that playground in Kassel, Germany. What wonderful influence we all could have shared with each other, perhaps lifelong friendships or just a truer understanding of each other's cultures.
So maybe today you can release a judgment of someone, take down your wall and see who that person actually is. And maybe someone will release their judgment of you and allow you to be imperfect and human, perhaps show you some compassion as you also make your way on this human journey. Just a thought. What do you think?
