I love people. I can’t begin to tell you how much I love humans.
8 BILLION people experience every day from a different perspective, living a different life; those are 8 billion different stories every day.
Although I fully understand that the beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, I believe that every person has something beautiful about them. Every day, I go to school and meet my classmates. Some think that this would get boring quickly. Indeed, the school itself did, but not the people. I appreciate things both big and small: dimples while smiling, guy’s confidence, girl’s freight of spiders, someone’s ambitions to get better and speak more eloquently, and so on.
There is so much to learn about everyone, so many stories – and they are often left untold. Some people mistake my curiosity for an attempt of violation of person boundaries, some think that I am challenging their opinions because of my thorough, investigative questions that follow after their answers: “Really? But why this and not that? Why not “foo” or “bar”?” Yet, I am just trying to grasp the people, get their mental models, acquire their way of thinking – I want to feel them. But again, sometimes I’m not given the liberty.
I love humans. As a Humanist, I am extroverted (specifically when I talk in a language I can speak well). This extroversion has certain pros and cons. Pros: I’m really easy to get along with, I try to cater my personality to you when talking, and I’m in for some small talk. As for cons: some a few folks think I’m some fruitloop asking random questions, not caring what they (have to) say… a-a-and that’s it! Nothing more! I think it’s worth it.
My humanism also encapsulates getting to know more about archetypes of people. I am quite a mixed archetype of my own (I feel like this also contributes to the fruitloop impression, lol). And because I also chat with people from different countries and cultures, I get diverse mental models; like I said, this also makes my own archetype very nuanced and rare – to the point that people don’t expect completely normal things like me listening to Taylor Swift…? or rock? or when they hear the first two, classical music’s now surprising (although it wouldn’t have been otherwise, if the former were left untold)? huh? lol. genuinely surprised.
Every humans belongs to a certain culture (at least upon birth) and has a mother tongue. I’m out for those! I love exploring cultures and learning languages. Recently, my German has been getting slightly better, making me more confident when I speak to strangers; somehow (it’s a direct correlation, to be fair) this has also enabled me to get a deeper sense of people and certain cultural aspects.
I’m really looking forward to learning French and exploring the francophone culture. However, I have so many things on my plate that I suppose I will have to postpone this relish for later — sadge (sic.; = sad)!
What I also noticed is that my gratitude, appreciation of nature and everything around, and my Humanist nature — they all developed at the same time. I’ll assume there is a direct correlation here too, since all of those are more specific versions of “appreciation” as an abstract concept.
I could have covered this topic more in-depth, but I somehow couldn’t. I will loop back to this sometime in the future to make this a worthwhile read.
- Nihad Badalov