a thought on DIVERSITY

There’s a line that I read from Jack London’s book Martin Eden; and quoting it just felt right.

“Her own limits were the limits of her horizon; but limited minds can recognize limitations only in others. And so she felt that her outlook was very wide indeed, and that where his conflicted with hers marked his limitations; and she dreamed of helping him to see as she saw, of widening his horizon until it was identified with hers.”

The bolded sentence I took a long time understanding.

I asked myself why; Why would Jack London go to lengths to describe a character as an intellectual and eager college student and then offset the reader by saying she has a limited mind concerned with conveying her own beliefs? Shortly I asked what this said about me, who’s similar to this girl, and then about you.

Just like this fictional character pursuing a college education with seemingly wide horizons, I have limits to my mind and this quote exposes them.

We don’t understand and exercise diversity as wholly. When confronted with a perspective and idea contradicting our political or personal values, how many of us unknowingly recoil to the defensive mode in an attempt to “fix” or put the person on the “right” path?

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The quote eventually showed me that viewing the differences of other’s points of views and mindsets as weak or lacking simply because they’re not the identical of yours is what makes you narrow minded in the first place.

Because isn’t doing so a form of aggrandizing your own ideologies and labeling any other point of view as inferior to yours? You would not be looking at the different and equally valuable lesson that perspective is bringing out but focusing on why that lesson is different from yours and that it shouldn’t be.

But I’m here to say it should be different.

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The problem is, as we refrain from seeing the benefit that diverse mindsets can bring to the table we’re only producing the same mindsets as ours which are only able to bring the same single benefit to the table. This is of no value nor novelty and thus extremely boring!!

A narrow mind misses the color and the potential growth in different perspectives as it resists diversity, too concerned with making everyone be the same way it thinks is “right”.