A simple question, but a question we hear so often. Even in our own countries, we ask that question.
Of course I will never say it doesn’t matter. But only when that question is about sharing, loving, and talking about the places where we live at the moment !
Other than that, why does it matter to you where someone is from? ? Have you ever thought about the impact that answer can have on your life, the way you to talk to someone, and the way that influences/changes your opinion of someone ? Yes, questions can have a big impact on someone in so many different ways. A word can be so powerful to someone; they can totally change someone’s life. Words…
But coming back to the subject ; I have seen my dad suffering because he’s Italian by birth, but left his country to follow his love in France. And after years of living in France, we started to hear people in Italy saying, “You are not Italian anymore.” In France people say, ”With your accent and the way you speak, you are not French.” So what is he?? Lost between two countries, and he himself lost because he doesn’t have any country to attach to that can help to tell him who he is! But why does it have to be like that?
Of Course seeing someone from another country can help us to bond with others, to share different parts of life, to learn, and to love differently. That is so wonderful!
But on the other side of that story, it can identify someone in a way that isn’t true. It can categorize someone negatively. It can give a wrong first impression of someone. It can sadly cause us to judge someone.
Today, to fit in a group, to correspond to a standard that society gave to us, we must love a country more than we love people, judging a country’s value more than people. But why?? Aren’t we humans first ? Not with all these standards that start to choke our freedom of thought over time. Or, a sI like to say, to choke “the real you,” and by that I mean, the way you can be without being influenced by others. Why do we have to think with these predefined standards?
In other words, I think we don’t have to forget that we live on Earth, a beautiful place to explore, to share and a simple world to live in. Do we have to define ourselves by the places where we live? And in life some people move to so many places/countries. I think places help us to build and explore the people we are. Only that perspective of life can help us grow as human beings. That perspective doesn’t allow us to judge or categorize someone. It doesn’t matter if you were born in a place that has seen many difficulties or, on other hand, a place where people live very comfortably. It doesn’t matter where you come from but rather what you do with the time that you walk on earth. Do you prefer to discover some new perspectives of life through a place or to be stuck in that place?
We so often see wonderful people born in bad places and the opposite of bad people from beautiful places.
We force ourselves to live by so many standards, and get mad when we can’t live up to them.
Like today, because I drive from a different part of my country, people get angry because they see on the license plate of my car that I am not from there, and because I drive carefully they get mad. It happens all the time to justify a person’s behaviour as being good or bad just because they are from one place or another. I’m not trying to say that I’m not guilty of sometimes doing this too. I used to sometimes justify my preconceptions by judging others, like in the car I would think to myself “Oh I see he is not from here, that’s why he is a terrible driver.”
But in the end we have to ask ourselves, what kind of world do we want to leave behind? For me it’s a place where I don’t have to justify my presence and actions all the time. - certainly not based on where I am from, and not in order to let people decide if I am a good or bad person because I am from a place that doesn't conform to their opinions. There are so many stereotypes we can make just about the places where we were born. So we let people have an opinion about a place (usually) that they’ve never been before. Yes of course we can have our own opinion, I’m not suggesting otherwise, but we do have to remember to make room for the unknown. Because it’s the unknown that helps us to grow and to become what we want to be.
We are more than a job, a city or whatever else we decide to get stuck in .
I AM human !
