Learn to understand others

Imagine, for a moment, waking up in a differ­ent place, like a room with dirty walls and rats running along the floor boards, or a very large room with a canopy bed and an exquisite chandler hanging from the center of the room’s ceiling.

Then you find out that you are a different age, maybe a different gender.

You might discover you have schizophrenia or an eating disorder that is not a result of you thinking you are fat, but your fam­ily is too poor to provide food or you have an over­abundance of food that you consume too often.

Whatever life it is you wake up to, it turns out that this life at one time was only a scenario, one where you might have felt sorry for the person liv­ing it, or even surprised people actually live that way.

Either way, imagine hav­ing to live this life for a week or if you can even survive depending upon the circumstances.

Socio-cultural and socio-economic statuses are factors that have shaped us throughout our lives as of now.

If unfamiliar with these terms, socio-cultural and socio-economic deter­minants are fixtures in our lives such as: place of birth, type of parents, social class, gender, social expectations such as mar­riage, children, etc.

There are so many fac­tors of our lives that influence us, and many of these are out of our control.

Many people I know automatically assume that people who are homeless are alcoholics, drug ad­dicts or just bums - but in reality there are hon­est, hard working people whose lives have been turned upside down by factors they could not control.

Also, if you really think about it, drugs and alco­hol. Factors that can force a person to spin out of control.

It is not always just a self-esteem problem for someone’s life to spin out of control, but also some­thing that has physically, emotionally, and cogni­tively taken a toll on one’s body.

I think that many of us in college take for granted the possibilities of our future.

We stress over get­ting the rewards that we expect to get out of life when there are people who do not even have the possibilities that we have lined up for the future.

These life determinants have taken control of the outcome of their futures.

I believe that we need to respect those people you are less unfortunate than ourselves, because in my opinion those people we categorize as the less un­fortunate are actually the people we can learn from the most.

People who might actu­ally take time to realize the day had gone by and enjoy it, and maybe be able to tell us what we really look like as we run around with our nose in the air at times, ignoring the different perspectives from all types of people.

We can learn not only about ourselves, but about life in general.

If we are truly striving for an education and not just a degree we need to be social with different types of people and come to understand the entirety of education, as we will soon be out there apply­ing the words we have consumed in college.

Unless you only plan to get a degree and be oblivi­ous the surroundings, you chose to ignore.

• Facebook Comments
• Site Comments

Be the first to comment on this article!

Add comment


I am not posting spam. I understand posting spam or other comments that are unrelated to this article will cause my comment to be flagged for deletion and possibly cause my IP address to be permanently banned from this server.

Enter the characters in the image above:

log out