Empathy - #37HT

It was the goodbye moment, this time it wasn't just for the great experience that I had in Linz, but also for my host hitchhiker. Nadine needed to go back home. In fact her plan would be to join us until České Budějovice and then go back to Germany by Blablacar, but she just decided to be one more day with us.

This goodbye was so much different than the one that we had after the night that I spent in her place. We've spent 4 days with each other, sharing the same places 24/7 and know each other in an intensive way. That's how it works in Couchsurfing when there is a good match. You can spend few hours, days with this person, but this intensive way how to meet he/she, it makes you skip a lot stages in the process to get know someone and in a short time you already know a lot of he/she.

That's why the goodbye is hard. It's like say goodbye to a good friend that you don't know when you're going to see him or her again. It already happened couple times with me in different ways. Something like that I would like to spend longer time and I was asking myself the reason why the time passed so quickly. But well, it's a step of the life. These moments needed to happen in this period of time, something like destiny. I'm really grateful because it's constantly changing my life in different ways. Every people that I met somehow made who I am now.

The man is product of his environment. Of course this expression isn't that simple to be explained. However I highly believe on it. Everyone that I met until now made who I am now. There is one guy that lived in Brazil for 23 years, lived in the USA for 16 months and stayed in Brazil for more 18 months, then he decided to move to Europe and now he's here for almost 18 months, living and traveling different countries constantly and meeting hundreds of new people, having hundreds of new experiences. This guy is me. Every moment of my life I can see a different Alexandre. If you met me in any of these different moments you'll understand what I'm saying. Probably when now that you're reading it, I'm already a different person.

Don't be afraid! I'm in an ascendant curve of changing. It's not something like today I'm the good guy and tomorrow I'll be the bad guy. I'm not oscillating my personality; I just have the feeling that I'm improving it. That overtime I'm leaning more about myself, finding my defects, trying to understand them and trying to find a way how to treat them.

For any problem that there is in the society the way to how improve is understanding it well. Once you really understood the root, you can start to think how to solve or improve it. For everything, no exception. What I'm trying to say is, do never define something as a good or bad before you knowing and understand it. In fact you're never going to be 100% sure about this thing and it's perfect. You just reach this stage because you're always arguing with yourself about topics and ideas. You're hunting for information and your perception of the world isn't in just few people that you heard or read about it.

Over time meeting people, I could start to see so many facts and ideas be shared in many different ways. You can think about culture, religion, political orientation or sexuality, in fact you can think about everything. Once now I'm intensively listening, reading, seeing, talking, arguing with other people from different backgrounds and ideas, I can start to analyze all of them and create my own idea about what's right or wrong. I'm sure that I'll never be sure about it; otherwise I would stop to argue with myself, once that it's 100% truth.

In science nothing is 100% true, nothing. Its field is always opened for new evidences; there is no closed case. You can always say to any theory that it's not true, you just need to proof. It's the same in our life, there is nothing 100% true, even for things that you know it really well and we built a strong option about it, we always need to be opened that maybe what we're thinking can't maybe not be true.

I was the kind of person that my ideas and options was based in what my family, friends, teachers, spiritual leaders, mentors use to tell me. This was their truth that became my truth. Few people made my mind and I didn't have the chance to argue with myself once mostly the information was shared from just one side. 

Things like:

Weed is a drug;

It's wrong to have sex before get married;

Other religions are worshiping the devil;

Homosexuality is a disease;

A white skin person is more beautiful than a black one;

Straight hair is cooler than Afro ones;

Racial quotas are senseless;

Criminal deserves hard punishment and some of them, the death;

Feminist movements are senseless;

You need to dress yourself well be "someone";

You need to show to other people what you have;

You need to change your personality to start a friendship.

Trust me, I already supported all these sentences above, most of them until 4 years ago. Now, I know that I was completely wrong about these things and I know that hardly ever my mind is going to change in the other way around, but I really hope that I can still learn more about it and I just need to keep searching for it. When I see someone that think that same things that is written above, I don't judge him or her as a bad person. I was like that and I needed to experience things in my life to change it, they just need these experiences. The man is product of his environment. He or she is the person that their family, friends, society shaped them. This is one of the lessons that I'm having everyday.

What Can I do now? Whenever I can, I try to share in what I believe, in the same way that I'm doing with you now, while you're reading me.

Dude, do never forget, don't limit your ideas in just what you hear daily in your "neighborhood" or even what I wrote. Open your mind, travel, meet people and face the reality of other people and try to feel as them, it's called as empathy. 

 Tips:

https://futurism.com/in-science-there-are-no-alternative-facts/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehO9nCMGE-Q&t=5s