It occurred to me recently that we are never the people we once were. Change is happening constantly. Every person we meet, class we take, city we visit and movie we watch influences us in some way. It only follows, then, that as we progress through life, undergoing new sources of influence, we change. We learn new ways to communicate. We gain new knowledge and new creativity.
If this is the case, then when we meet new people, especially as we get older, we never truly know who they have been. We might know someone as they are now, but we don’t know who they were before or what caused them to be the way they are now.
We are always going through different phases of life. It’s impossible to know for sure what phase of life someone is in when we meet them. I think most of us assume we can figure someone out based on the way they act and talk. What we forget is that these physical attributes are subject to influence just like the rest of the person. The odds of people remaining consistent over the course of their life are very slim. Their true inner soul isn’t always portrayed in the way they appear.
People are like books. As we grow older, moving further through life, we create new chapters. With each chapter, the plot changes, and the characters develop. We too are always developing: becoming stronger, more independent or, in unfortunate cases, weaker and more dependent. Either way, change is occurring.
So when you meet a new person, or even as you get to know people you have already met, remember that you are starting a book from the middle. You don’t know how it began or what took place before you got there. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t responsible for their actions. Our pasts cannot always be used as excuses. What it does mean is that we ought not to judge people based only on how they appear to us now. Every individual is complex, and everyone has a story. We owe it to one another to respect every part of the story, not just the current page.
