Walking in Someone Else's Shoes

There is an old Native American (I think) proverb that says “don’t judge someone until you have walked a mile in their shoes”. Our human nature, however, is to judge, in particular the poor if we are not one of them. Far from imagining what it would be like in their shoes, we tend to look at their circumstances from our own point of view and assigning our own sets of priorities. We see people making decisions that to us seem incomprehensible and too often attribute them to character flaws; old ladies using their social Security money on slot machines; victims of Katrina wasting the couple hundred or maybe thousand dollars they received on the riverboat casinos; people who barely have enough to eat, smoking; barns and farmhouses in shambles; garbage strewn in the streets; the list goes on. We think “how can they? I would never live like that. I wouldn’t gamble what little money I have away and give up smoking and fix my barn and not allow garbage to accumulate in the street. There has to be something wrong with these people”. We think about what we would like to do in a given situation, but in reality, in that circumstance, most likely we would do something totally different. Given our genes, culture, experience and in particular, circumstance, we put thing in a particular order of importance. Our judgment of others assumes they have the same set of priorities, are in our settings and benefit from our experiences. The fact of the matter is that not only do they not, but our own priorities, settings and experiences are constantly changing. A child is born, we lose a job, win a lottery, become ill, we grow wiser or become more cynical. In reality as we go through life and as our surroundings and experiences change, so do our priorities. Things once thought to be of utmost importance can become trivial. Unfortunately we can never walk in someone else’s shoes. We cannot have an identical makeup or experience and even if we did, we cannot occupy the same space in time. The best we can do is try to imagine what might be important to someone given their set of circumstances. But even that is a poor approximation of a stroll in their shoes. The other day I read a piece in the Huffington Post by Linda Tirado who in the most eloquent way, tries to explain the thought process of a very poor person. From the article I think one can get a peek into their priorities and decisions, which from our perspective may have seemed lousy, but now start to be a little more understandable. Below is a link to that article. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-tirado/why-poor-peoples-bad-decisions-make-perfect-sense_b_4326233.html