A Mile in Someone Else's Shoes

If you want to understand someone's point of view, it is said that we are to walk a mile in their shoes. An interesting idea, but there are many questions to be asked about that. For example, what if their shoes don't fit? What if they don't want to give you their shoes? Or perhaps the best question, what if you don't want to take their shoes?

If we want to learn about different people, it is important that we take into account their perspective as well as trying to incorporate ours as well. As for the first question, some people are stubborn. Sometimes, someone else's ideas are so abstract to you that you cannot rightly consider there ideas. These ideas are just too off of your norm. How is it that we can even listen to someone and take them seriously when what they say just sounds impossible to us. If we are to walk a mile in someone's shoes we'd better make sure that they fit because if we are not comfortable with someone's shoes, there is no way we're going to walk anywhere with them.

Secondly, not everyone is up for a discussion. I, personally, love to talk, about anything, but not everyone is like me. Just because I have and idea and I want to discuss it with someone else, doesn't mean they'll want to talk to me. Do learn something new, or hear from someone with ideas unlike our own, we need to convince them they should share their ideas (shoes).

The biggest problem with encountering someone unlike ourselves is actually considering their information as important. We come into a conversation without keeping an open mind, there is no way that anything the person (or thing) has to teach us will be absorbed. We must come into a discussion with an open mind, we should try our best not to condemn the other person, but at the same time, we must be sure that we do not simply accept whatever the other person has to say. If we don't want to consider other people's ideas, and simply ignore anything someone poses that is contradictory to our own, how are we ever supposed to learn if we do not even give ourselves a chance.

As long as we are open to learning, there will always be people to teach us new things. Keep in mind that everyone has valuable information, and we can allow ourselves to walk forever in many different shoes. This metaphor may be clique, but it works. We can walk for our entire lifetime, and even if we don't end up exactly where we wanted to, we need to consider all of what we learned along the way as important too.