Life Lessons: Accepting Diversity

Is it useful to make public lessons I think may only be understood through experience? I'm not sure how I feel about it.

At the ripe old age of 26, I'm still maturing. In fact, I haven't really noticed a truly significant slowdown in the "growing up" process in maybe 10 years. Am I especially immature? I like to think not.

I'm not sure when I realized it, but I'm naturally very dismissive of other views. I now believe that this is really just a form of immaturity. Part of maturing, part of "growing up" (as the idiom goes), is shedding irrelevant paradigms we develop when we're younger. The paradigm to shed is "when I've found the right way to do/think about/view something, it's the right way." Life isn't some hard science, it's dynamic and diverse: there are multiple methods to reach any solution.

I'd think that traveling abroad might open your eyes to this. Perhaps in America we're especially prone to this particular immaturity due to our somewhat unique situation. We have a fair degree of diversity in our culture (usually), perhaps we fall into a trap where the norms of our culture are accepted as absolutes: we're alright with diversity, as long as it falls within a certain range of behaviors.

So what does this all mean? Potentially nothing to you, reader. To me, it means an attempt to catch myself when I find myself looking down on another's viewpoint or ideas, dismissing it without thought because it falls outside the range of what I feel is "normal". If I catch myself, I'll take a deep breath, and consider the idea, consider how the person arrived at their conclusion, and think about its relevance and how best to react.

Of course, if the idea is still ridiculous, I reserve the right to laugh at it.