Do you know that there are many things that happen to us which are our common and mutual experiences? Many of which we see and are able to express just the same as other people. Like how a bright yellow flower looks beautiful or how nice a rose smells. How the sound of birds are delightful to ears and how the sunset and the orange sky looks amazing.
But in our common experiences there is something very personal and something we will never be able to gauge or perceive. It’s not just the fact that how much one loves the yellow color of the flower but how does another person sees it. What is the surety that he sees the same yellow as you? May be he saw a lighter version or darker. We can’t say!
Moving away from this simple example I wanted talk of life experiences. How would we know that what we feel or how we understand affection, care and love is the same for the other person? How they perceive these common experiences we share? What little detail did they see and which are the parts they remember?
Life is complicated because we have been given this individual identity and a whole system to function that is similar to every other human yet somehow we have a brain that works differently. I have for long tried to understand other people point of view. I have tried to step in their shoe and see what they see. But honestly that is not possible. We may get a general understanding of their point of view but we can never be in the place of other person.
This great quote seems to explain better what I want to say:
“We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.”
Elie Wiesel, Night and Dawn
So I think the need is to realize this that each person is unique and no matter how much we know them we can’t know how exactly they think or feel. This leads to the part where I tell you that we have to respect each other for the universe that we carry in our hearts. We all deserve to be able to get along with who we are and how we like things.
I also love this quote of Paulo Coelho where he gives the emphasis on how each life is important and how it matters. You might be able to picture how your grandparents’ life must have been but you will never able to know how they felt, how they laughed and smiled when they were young. What they saw and learned.
Even if we try we cannot even glimpse into the heart of others to see what it feel to them to stand in the rain, to walk through a forest, to see the shooting stars, to hold a new born, to fall down, to get hurt, to feel loved, to remember memories. We will just never know.
“Whenever someone dies, a part of the universe dies too. Everything a person felt, experience and saw dies with them, like tears in the rain.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone
Amna World 