Appearances
Living in diverse urban cities, we see every sort of person. The rich array of appearances evoke instant assumptions, generalizations, biases, and reactions.
People who are well-dressed and poorly dressed and at different levels of self-care, different skin colors and textures, postures, gaits, speech patterns and language, manners, consciousness of their surroundings, attitudes as they interact with others, out of style and in style hair and clothes, indicators of social class and hints of education in how people articulate, or not. With enough imposed or chosen proximities, there’s the whole pastiche of smells and fragrances.
The continuous flow of internal commentaries, assumptions, wonderings, and pre-judgments is as interesting as the flow of external appearances. Everything is organized by the lens of our previous experiences and scope of exposure.
For me, having taught and worked with people from every continent and every major ethnic group, I know from experience and exposure that little can be confidently concluded from appearances. Everyone has strengths and passions, few of which can be accurately extracted from a few moments of observation without the richness of hearing their stories.
