Don’t Make Assumptions
Don’t Make Assumptions became popularized in the book The Four Agreements – written by Don Miguel Ruiz. At first blush, this seems easy enough-but check -how many times per day do you assume the outcome of something; or feel sure that you know what someone is about to say; or that what you see with your eyes is what is there. There are many examples to support this option – and here is one I really like.
Anand Giridharadas is a young Indian=American journalist whose book, True American, won all sorts of Best Book of the Year awards about a Texas vigilante who walked into a Dallas mini-mart ten days after 9/11 and shot Raisuddin Bhuiyan, an enterprising Muslim immigrant from Bangladesh.
Bhuiyan survives, ends up getting to know his swastika-tattooed perpetrator, befriends his daughter, even tries to free him from death row. Let’s just say that the book is incredibly inspiring and beneath the labels (meaningless thoughts) is a much deeper story. (read last week’s blog on forgiving everyone everything).
But this example features Giridharadas himself. He’s a 30-something, politically liberal, very PC. Sometime ago a middle-aged white guy came to install a stove in his Brooklyn apartment. The white guy asks, “so where are you from?”
That all too familiar question always raises red flags. Here we go again. Another redneck racist making assumptions about my brown skin.
But in that moment, he chose to give up that meaningless thought.
Rather than deliver his stock, wiseass answer (Cleveland, because well, he was born in Cleveland and raised by Indian immigrants in Cleveland). He decided to give him the answer he knew he wanted. “I was born in Cleveland, but my family comes from India.”
The stove repairman smiled, and said, “that is what I thought. My brother married a woman from India. She has become the light in our family. We were a pretty dysfunctional family and then she turned everything around.”
So yes, its easy to assume I know the way people are, the way this day is going to play out, the constant fear in the news, but once I give up my meaningless thoughts, a beautiful new indescribable happiness is free to come streaming in.
Try it!
