My whole life I’ve been taught to define what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.
The line between the two was so clearly drawn, and I hardly questioned why the two were bordered like so, why they were mutually exclusive from one another. I didn’t wonder who defined the ‘right’ from the ‘wrong’. I just acepted it as how it was, how life was supposed to be, no questions or doubts. Afterall, didn’t everyone play by the same rules?
Enter my first semester in Arts, and I was told by every single one of my tutors that there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. This left me completely bewildered, of course. How could it be that there was no ‘correct’ answer? I didn’t get it. My whole past education, my teachers always defined what the ‘correct’ behaviour and set of answers to an assignment were.
And I’ve been pondering over this for the past number of weeks, and here’s what I think: what we think is defined as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is shaped by how we were brought up.
I could tell you that it’s called ‘slippers’, but you disagree and correct me, that it’s called ‘thongs’. But neither of us are wrong, we are both correct. It doesn’t matter that its called ‘slippers’ or ‘thongs’, or whether its called ‘football’ or ‘soccer’. These are all just preferences, opinions and perspectives that we’ve gathered while growing up from different backgrounds. And perhaps instead of projecting what we think onto others, we should come to respect one another instead.
We also shouldn’t be so quick as to define, categorise and label something either. It’s never as simple as that, there are always more layers, stories and reasons to it. Such as people. We all have different heights, builds, backgrounds and experiences. And these are all our layers, which are what makes us interesting and multidimensional.
So, let us look at life in a plethora of colour, instead of constricting our vision to simply black and white.
