A Fresh Eye

Have you ever thought about the way you breathe, and then found that you couldn't breathe normally? I find that this is kind of what happens when you think about the things that you've gotten used to. You start seeing them in a different way, and they seem so foreign and alien and weird to you.

Take, for example, racism. What's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear that word? Yeah, ignore that. Think about racism, what it actually is. Don't you find it seriously weird that some people hate other people based purely on the color of their skin? I mean, seriously, just because a few people from certain countries blew something up doesn't mean that every single citizen in these countries is a terrorist! It seems extraordinarily weird, shallow even, to think that some people are better than others just because they have lighter skin! Honestly, in what deep, dark, cobweb-full corner of people's minds did they dig in to come up with that idea?

It seems like as time goes by, we get used to certain ideas and things, and so we learn to kind of just accept them. Take, for example, when bird flu first broke out. Most people (yours truly included) stopped eating chicken for a few weeks and then kind of...fell out of it. I guess that's what happens when we live with a certain idea for some time. We lose the passion we had at the beginning. By that I don't mean not eating chicken, I mean not getting so used to something that's completely unacceptable that it becomes normal. The only way to change the world we live in today is to think over things with a fresh eye and a fresh mind. Like they say, "If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always gotten." Change won't happen unless we take a fresh look at our lives from time to time so we can find out where we went wrong and how we can make things better.

We really need to start learning to keep an open mind. By that I don't mean giving up on all your beliefs and letting new ones rain down on you; I mean just accepting the idea that maybe you're wrong, maybe over time you forgot what you actually thought of something or that maybe, just maybe, if you think about something again you'll find that answer you've been looking for...