I think people who don’t appreciate a wide genre of music do not have soul in them, lack spontaneity and are totally BORING.
Before I get into trouble, let me clarify. I don’t think that people who have no or little appreciation of music from different genres lack spontaneity nor do I find them boring. I think being with a group of people who share exactly my interests can bore me. We were created to be different from one another – we are in essence, all weird. We were made to have our own interests. I only made that sentence because I remember someone saying “I think those who do not read books are shallow.”
I read books but I am not a voracious reader. I don’t think I am shallow though. What if for a rejoinder, someone says this – “Surely not all bookworms have depth. They could all be the highly dogmatic geeks who know stuff up there, who can recite lines lifted from a book, ergo not their own and ergo is not real to them. “
Harsh? Obnoxious? Presumptuous? Egotistical?
Aren’t we all guilty of this? Consciously or subconsciously, we categorize people based on a few key descriptors culled from our finite observations. We place them in neatly labeled boxes in our heads, labels that are products of our own biases, biases that were borne out of our own personal history, our childhood, our education, our family and our own insecurities.
Even we place labels on ourselves. It is a way for people to understand us without having to know us. We say we are this sort of person or that because, hey — who knows us better than ourselves right? We fear exposing ourselves because no one might like what they see or we might not live up to expectations.
We do this because it is the safer thing to do. It brings order and logic to an otherwise chaotic environment. We are all too diverse that we need to find some pattern somewhere to make sense of how varied we are. We tend to find the bell curve and conclude that it must be right one. We make our own sweeping statements about people we interact with – we do this to an acquaintance and boy! – don’t we also do this to our own friends? Perhaps this is survival instinct, otherwise we might end up confused.
During Sunday worship, our Pastor mentioned a book by John Ortberg which sounds interesting. The title goes something like, People are Normal Until You Know them (or something like that). I have to get a copy of that!
We are all weird. OK— if you don’t like the word weird, let us use — unique. As we grow older, we will continue to meet people who, in our minds’ eye, are ‘kakaiba’ or “ibang level’. As we grow older, we ought to realize too that we have a blind side — meaning that there is a side to us that can be seen by someone outside yourself. On certain occasions, we need this to let us know that the labels we put on ourselves are way off, slighly off or just — wrong.
The sooner we accept that, the more we will be gracious to people who are different from us or react differently to us.
Minus the convenient and sweeping conclusions.
