Although we all want to be seen for who we are, pure and free of labels, categories, preconceived ideas and judgements, it is challenging, if not impossible, to look at someone without any past experiences influencing the perception of the other.
Even our best intentions can be contaminated by past unresolved hurt and anger, therefore tainting the other with that experience, blinding us to who the other truly is. The result is rejection, fear, anger or distrust. A general term to describe this is bias. A bias is precisely that, and even thou not everyone is willing to accept their judgement is biased, most people will recognise that they enter new encounters with previously programmed categories and tend to want others to fit in them. It is an automatic attempt to make sense of the world in terms of the past. Yet, mechanical or forced, conscious or unaware, they are not compassionated towards the other, limiting the possibilities of expressing their reality.
The process of learning something new comes into play when we meet a new person or try to create a relationship, whether a friendship, business or romantic (and everything in between and beyond). The categories we learn to use to identify the other can be distorted by our emotional attachments to the experience. The pain or pleasure we feel when someone plays a role in our lives is the most private label we create and thus belongs only to subjective experience. Sometimes this can be confused with a “gut feeling” about someone. A gut feeling that this person will do us wrong might as well be an unconscious projection of past pain triggered by some physical similarity between the two agents.
Could we meet each other as if we were discovering a new word, an empty graphic/soundbox that can be filled by only one thing, only what is uttered by a person?
That contained is unique, individual, and unrepeatable essence. Even when we are reminded of previous experiences, we should always remember that each breath we take is one, the first and the last of its kind.
And like that, should we meet each other every day, the box, now flexible and changing, allowing each being to adjust, change, grow and shrink as necessary, like the lungs, filling and expanding, absorbing and assimilating, releasing and detaching. Then starting again, in complete confidence, there is something new to attain.