Today while shopping at the supermarket I got locked into an aisle spiral with a rather fat family. Fat people as a rule tend to have fat children and while this couple's children weren't fat, yet, they were well on their way to cholesterol clogged arteries and perspiring at the thought of having to climb some stairs (or whatever it is that these people do). Calling these people fat is being kind, a medical professional or others would no doubt have referred to them as morbidly obese. This level of description and detail is unnecessary and unkind. I am not sure when our paths were intertwined but I think it happened somewhere around where they sold the bottles of sauce. I was going one way and they were going the other and from then on, without fail I would pass them as I moved from aisle to aisle through the supermarket. What makes this special and worthy of note is that when I arrived at the car to load my shopping in, I saw them again, loading up their car. Their car that they had parked in the bay directly in front of mine. I wish I was making this stuff up.
Some things I have learnt, it is by no means an exhaustive list:
- People like being right, they do not like it when they are told something they believe to be right is wrong.
- The root cause of world conflicts is control of territory and resources.
- Everyone is prejudiced against some group of people.
- Nearly everyone is an idiot, this doesn't mean you shouldn't listen to them though.
- All communication is about sharing information.
- The more money you make your employer + the less number of people who can do your job = the more you get paid.
- All information is valuable and useful, it is just a matter of finding a way to use it.
- We judge others harshly for committing the same sins we commit. The people we judge the harshest are those who commit the sins, we wish we could commit.
I do not like lists like that, they have hokey greeting cardeseque nature to them. I do not like maxims which end up on bumper stickers. I do not like these things because they belong to a world that I do not and can not belong to. I do not have it in me to look at the world in a simplistic black and white way, as much as I would like to. That now that I think about it is only part of the reason.
The other part is because they are presented often as some grand set of truths. Granted there is no other way it can be presented but it still grates. Truth (whatever that may be) possibly exists, but not in the form of lists like that.
That is all.
