How To Think Out Of The Box
We rush to judge people, sure, but we do it with information too. Lately I've been working my way through a stack of interior decorating books. (Men, you get a pass here, since I tend to breeze right past the hunting titles.) Three of them, and going in I wasn't much drawn to what they covered. Even after a first flip-through I stayed unmoved. But once I slowed down, looked at the photos and actually read the text beside them, a few usable ideas stuck with me for whatever decorating I do down the road.
The least appealing of the bunch was a book about "green" decorating, and to my mind the authors pushed it past the point of reason. Yet that was the one that taught me how to spot quality in furniture and fabric: the kind of pieces that hold up for years and won't need replacing soon, maybe not in your lifetime at all.
That is what thinking outside the box looks like, and it slips past us easily. We pour our attention into subjects we already enjoy and skim over the rest, assuming anything written about a topic we dislike has nothing to offer. So we miss what's buried in there, either because we doubt it would ever be covered, or because we toss it aside on sight for being tied to something we disapprove of.
The habit runs deeper than decorating books. We generalize. One thing we can't stand gets linked to something, and suddenly the whole thing is contaminated for us. Prejudice works this way. A single bad run-in with one religious group or one culture can push a person to write off the entire group, and then everything near it.
So here is a way to loosen that grip. Look harder, and look longer, before you paint everything connected to a thing with the same brush. Travel is a good test case. Plenty of people find foreign countries hard going because so much is strange and takes getting used to. Push against that a little. Taste the odd dish. Go somewhere with a different climate, or terrain you've never walked.
Apple Valley caught me off guard. It sits in the desert east of Los Angeles, California, and I had no interest in deserts when I went. I was nervous about snakes, and not at all thrilled that the food during my stay would be vegetarian only. The reason I came was a workshop being held there. Then I looked out across that land and the horizon sat so far off it felt like I'd stepped onto the moon.
Take a chance. Try things, read about things, go places. You may stumble onto something you'd never have found by staying put with what's comfortable and known.