I was walking through the mall the other day when I overheard a conversation behind me. Well, half a conversation anyway. It was the voice of a young man complaining about how people looked at him. It went something like this:
I hate coming to this mall. I hate the way people look at me….like I’m a punk. They look at me like I’m a punk…it makes me wanna stab somebody’s eyes out! Man, one day I’m gonna stab somebody’s eyes out! I hate how people look at me!
As I listened to his angry statements I was curious about how he actually looked. I turned just enough to see him out of the corner of my eye. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the appearance of the young couple behind me. The thing that struck me was the young man’s attitude. I felt an urge to turn and tell the young man that if he didn’t want to be treated like a punk then perhaps an attitude adjustment was in order. I resisted the urge. I resisted because it wasn’t really my place and it seemed unlikely that he would have listened to me anyway. I also didn’t want to give him an excuse to try to stab my eyes out.
This got me thinking about how people see each other. How much of our perception of others is based on physical appearance? How much of our perception is based on a person’s attitude and behaviour? I suppose much of our first impressions could be based much more on physical appearance whether we mean to make such judgements or not. As we get to know people the basis of our perceptions shift away from physical appearance. In the case of this young man, I didn’t actually see what he looked like before making a judgement. (Forget for a moment that is was unfair of me to judge at all.) As I said, he piqued my curiosity when he first stated that people looked at him like he was a punk. What made it that much more likely was his follow up statement and attitude. Hopefully he was just having a bad day.
