further on the approach to the trip

Before I left for this trip and part of the reason it was prompted, was that I had noticed that I had been primarily surrounding myself with people similar to myself. Throughout my life I’ve been driven more by pursuits of understanding and wisdom than anything else. Social skills aren’t really all that relevant to understanding of transcendent truth, so I never really developed them fully. I had always wanted to make systematic and enduring change in the world, but my approach was similarly academic and detached.

Over the last year a variety realizations have made clear to me that you can’t really help anyone without understanding them. The trip around the country, the learning of Arabic in the Middle East and Chinese in China is designed around that effort to respect and be able to listen with compassion to people from completely different cultures. But since I’ve left DC it has been more than just an effort to learn about people, it has been a shift in the emphasis of how I frame each conversation.

This conscious openness to the experiences of others has yielded at least two huge benefits. The first is that people are more interested in what you have to say when they know that they have been heard and understood. The second is that it greatly increases the ability to see the potential in people. In everyone there is the tendency to judge. It is necessary to decide what to prioritize, how to manage our time, and whom to associate with. But the tendency to judge also limits perspective. It tries to categorize people as their current predominant characteristics instead of see them for what they can be. The nature of conscious inquisitiveness allows you to the aspects of whoever you are communicating with not only for the qualities that they are currently manifesting, but also lets you see the aspects about them that are not manifested and what may be holding them back from nurturing them. My aspirations all have to do with the improvement of society, and I am already appreciating how valuable it is to be able to see that potential.