What you see is what you get goes an old adage. Most times, if not all, we end up seeing what we feel we are seeing. And consider it to be absolute truth. Because that's what we experienced. That's what we know. But just cause we experienced or felt something does that become the truth? Does our perception of the things, event or an incident hold true because we feel that way or is it something beyond what we know?
Often times when we know what we know it is just one side of the story. We never know or realize about the other side. This happens for the simple reason because we have never bothered to empathize or experience firsthand the trials and tribulations of the other side. We just assume the things would be the way we want them to be or the way we see them. Rarely do we see or think about the way things are. This happens for the simple reason because we go by what we know, what we have felt and experienced.
What we forget in the process is that there is another side to the story, unexplored and unknown. We tend to ignore or discard the set of challenges the person is likely to face based on what we know. We go by a single narrative or a story that originates our lack of knowledge of others. It is precisely this that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns us about in her Ted talk - The danger of a single story. We build our picture of the person based on our experience or interactions with us or in public which we generalize. But that is never the full picture. It's what we see.
Therefore it is time to look beyond what we see. Time to explore and know what we have never known. Else we run the risk of getting trapped with a single perspective, a single narrative that can lead us to default assumptions that are incomplete and misleading. Better to change what we see.
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