“Don’t judge a book by its cover.”
One of the most clichéd quotes of history, and also among the most misunderstood ones.
Why? Well, books are not people but people are books. You can read them only when you understand the language they write themselves with. If, for example, you took out a book to read, which happens to be written in Latin, and you don’t know the language, you can’t really read whatever is written in it.
People are books written in their own unique languages. Not everyone knows their language and not everyone is willing to know. We all have covers that don’t really reflect or express the true content of what we’re made of. We are seen and judged by our covers. We even do this with real books in a bookstore. We pick out the ones with the best covers, not knowing that what’s inside could really suck.
How does the world see us? How do we see the world? What does the world see in us? What do we see from it? But seeing is not knowing, and to know something does not always require sight.
Humans are built to be selfish and judgmental creatures. Face it people, we have never-ending wants and needs and we are never satisfied with what we have. We are content perhaps, but never satisfied. We all love being on top. We all love how it feels to be better than everyone else. But just because you’re better at something than anyone else, it doesn’t mean you’re a better human than they are. It just makes you different.
No matter how big of a crowd we make, we would always be divided. There will always be the fat one, the pretty one, the nice one, the naughty one, the troublesome ones, and the angelic ones that hold a precious place in our hearts. There are other names for those people in high school: the geeks, the nerds, the flirts, the jocks, the rebels, the Goths, the misfits and so forth. We condemn ourselves with such titles, not knowing if these make us who we are or not. Most of us are unaware if we are hurting ourselves by letting ourselves be called and treated by how we are branded, or hurting those whom we brand.
These do not make us ourselves, but these can change the course of our lives. It is our own choice to have our lives run on by titles, or to run our lives on them.
High school is the most tumultuous stage in life. This is period when we discover the things we are capable of, and how well we are at them. It is a period of awareness, that we all have different faces and different dimensions in their initial stage of creation.
Perhaps, we are not yet seen as who we truly are because we are not ourselves yet. We don’t even have shapes yet, just profiles. But even an outline can already define us. Being a geek doesn’t make you a geek, nor does being a nerd make you a nerd. The common perception is not always right.
Max Ehrmann wrote, “…for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.” People at the top know how rough the road to getting there is. People at the bottom understand that life can get even harder. But for people who have always been where they’ve been and have remained there; they don’t know how it feels to be at the top and have the ground taken from their feet, nor do they know what it takes to build themselves from the ground up because all they’ve known all their lives was how good life could be.
We are all individuals who are misunderstood and misinterpreted. It is rare to find someone who can perceive you completely, if not perfectly. We can’t wait for the world to define us. We have to tell the world who we are. We are the only ones capable of speaking our personal language, and we’re the only ones capable of making the world understand it.
We are all books. God may be the author of our lives but we are the author of our own selves. There is only such a small difference between living and existing. We are breathing, sensing, and feeling when we live but we mean something when we exist. What our existence means is something the world has to know before we are perceived as something else we are not.
People are books with their own specific genres. We are usually seen as groups but what makes us individuals is what matters most. We shouldn’t let the world define us. We should define ourselves to the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment