Taking Candy From Strangers: Learning to Appreciate Differences
We live in a complicated world. The more interconnected our society gets, the more people move around and settle in places away from where they grew up, the more regional cultures come in contact with each other. Add in international immigration, urban vs. rural divides, and religious differences and things can get…messy. We don’t always understand each other and we don’t always like how other people are different.
Sometimes those cultures can clash. In our area of Washington State, there are a lot of immigrants from the former Soviet Republic. One time, Forrest was riding on the bus with our preschool aged kids. I’m sure they were a charming tableau, father and girls excited to go down to the library, with all the enthusiasm young children have for things like paying bus fare, choosing a seat and (what a treat!) pulling the cord to tell the bus driver to stop. On this particular day, a kind Eastern European woman offered some hard candies to the girls as a nice treat. Unfortunately, in our regional culture, kids aren’t allowed to take candy from strangers on busses and in our familial culture, they aren’t allowed sweets between meals (candy means extra shots for Willow, something we tried to avoid back then). The woman was offended as Forrest told the girls they could take the sweets but that he’d save them for lunch when Willow would be getting a shot anyway. He felt so bad, but how could he explain? All the woman saw was rejection. Forrest was between a rock and hard place.
This seemingly simple problem has evaporated with time. Willow can handle extra shots now and the girls are old enough to understand that “Don’t take candy from strangers” doesn’t have to include sweet old ladies. But the problem remains. There are people, even within our own families, who just see the world differently. We can be as vulnerable and apologetic as we like, but the beauty and difficulty of the world lies in that very complexity. How can we ever truly connect with people, especially since the more we get to know them, the more incomprehensible they may seem?
In the past, humans got over their differences because there was no choice. What were you going to do? Move all of your possessions by hand, to the next town over, and then somehow start anew, just because you were annoyed by each other? But now, there are so many people that we can reject each other and find new connections with little effort.
We’ve got to find a better way. I’ve let relationships slide because I didn’t have the maturity to overcome personality differences but that’s just putting off a problem for another day instead of dealing with it at the source: ourselves. We’ve got to become the type of people who see others’ annoying traits not as unreconcilable value conflicts but as opportunities for appreciation. More often than not, they are the natural results of characteristics that we do enjoy. With practice, we can accept them as simply another part of the people we enjoy spending time with.
