Assumptions
Hold them lightly
“Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”
Alan Alda
Travel really does a good job of challenging our assumptions. I had a “good scrubbing” of some of my assumptions on this trip. Traveling is not just for “sight-seeing”, I think it is a necessary remedy for our tendency for narrow-mindedness because it forces you to realize that your way of living is not the only way, or necessarily the “correct” way.
Sometimes our assumptions might be simple ones that get changed when we explore different food when we travel. I remember traveling to Venice and trying fresh anchovies for the first time. I was never a fan of anchovies but I decided I try fresh anchovies.
Boom, crushed that old assumption. They were good. It turned out I did like anchovies.
Another fun food assumption I had was changed during this recent trip was by our amazing guide, Roberto. He asked us about the most famous Italian dish called “Pasta al Pomodoro”. We knew it was a famous Italian pasta dish and we all assumed it was all Italian, through and through. Italy must have invented it right? Wrong? What? It turns out the tomato plant was brought to Europe from western South America in 1500’s!
So while Pasta al Pomodoro feels like an ancient heritage dish, it’s actually a product of global trade and cultural fusion—only becoming a true staple of Italian life in the last 200 years.
Boom, there goes another assumption busted.
These assumptions are not the tough ones though to bust through. It is ones we hold tightly. Maybe even the ones that have evolved into long-held beliefs.
Travel really is good for us! Mark Twain wrote his book, “The Innocents Abroad”, after traveling through Europe and the Holy Land. He noticed that people who never leave their hometowns tend to develop a rigid, distorted view of the rest of the world. He has this famous quote in the book.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
It takes courage to admit we are wrong. It begins with open-mindedness.
“I will live by the best I can discern today. Tomorrow I may find out I was wrong. Since I do not live by being right, I am not destroyed by being wrong.”
Verna Dozier
Let’s all just keep holding on lightly to our assumptions and not be afraid to let go of them when we find they were wrong.
On the path together,
John