I feel lucky in many ways, in spite of a hard life, with a family to raise, and work and university studies in parallel; sometimes three of that kind of jobs to bridge the gap: a few hours each per week, altogether adding up to a part-time job. I had very educated parents, siblings younger than myself, basically smart and healthy. Loving relationships. Friends.
We all know about the downsides, usually, after some time: Life is not what they show us in advertisements or those types of fairy tales where they ‘marry and live happily ever after’… or that kind of Hollywood movie. Disappointments occur. Layoffs. You get sick – and well again. And learn your limits that way.
Prejudice? Stereotypes? What do I mean?
Aren’t men always… and women always…?
Is it not clear as daylight that people who live alone are out for adventure?
That ‘job-hoppers’ just cannot keep a job down and often are bored after a few weeks?
Yes. And: No.
The thing is: Prejudices can sometimes help to quickly order our world, judge people we meet and ensure that we feel up to it: the person, the situation, the task – or a message.
Mostly it becomes even easier when we can look down on them, or it…
But I am out for something else here: If we judge people or situations that way, we too easily miss out on them. The kind-hearted ones who are not all that they seem to be. The experience that although difficult in itself makes you stronger.
These days it has become a fashion that social media are used as sort of presentation not to say selling platform: Not just companies but also people, individuals, expose their private life in order to show how great they did. What they achieved.
That can make a difference. When we look for a job. When we are out of one. Showing our professional expertise.
It can create the idea though, that everyone else is doing fine, ‘by the book’… ourselves being the only ones who also face sorrows. Difficulties. Or worse.
“In sickness and in health…” part of the official Christian marriage vows: They put it there in a nutshell: Life is a mixture, of love, of friendship found and lost; of disappointments; of successes, smaller or larger – and all those times you just got back up again.
Nelson Mandela, former South African president and before that fighter against apartheid which after 40 years imprisonment he actually witnessed going under, put it like this:
“Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”