As I was sitting to write, my son came up to me with extreme excitement and told me all about the research he was doing on gravitational physics. I sat there, nodded my head with a smile and acted like it all made sense to me. While he was talking, there was excitement and absolute joy in his eyes. His absolute hero in the world is Einstein, and he is like a kid in the candy store when he gets his Popular Science magazine. He is a great public speaker and good at sports, but his passion is in physics. I have always been so proud of him but the interesting part is that he is the total opposite of me. He is a geek!
I, on the other hand, have always been different -- the daydreamer and writer. I have always been the creative, artistic kind. No I couldn't draw or paint to save my life, but I could do wonders with words. I could act also, but writing was my thing. I could be in the car with my parents and create a whole story about an individual sitting on the side of the road. I am a dreamer!
In our world today, geeks are considered to be people who are smart. They are at the top of their class, the smart cookies. hey become doctors, engineers, astronauts, teachers, lawyers and so much more. They believe in logic and reasoning. They are the discoverers, the inventors, the CEOs and the leaders.
The dreamers like me are never at the top of their class. We are constantly dreaming of a how and what to create. It could be in the form of putting words, colors, lines, jewelry or fabric together to create a masterpiece. We are artists, writers, travelers, designers, singers etc.
While writing this piece it dawned on me that I was committing a mental crime of sorts. The crime was labeling people. Why, as humans, do we put a label on someone and assume that the person we are labeling is just that? We label ourselves, our children, our family members and even people we don't know. We assume that they are geeks or artists; sometimes we even label them as ignorant or arrogant, just because we see them as that. We look at people from other countries and races and assume they are different from us. We automatically tend to label them because our brain is trained to do that. As a young child, we are taught to stay away from certain people and how people that are different from us need to be kept at a distance.
I think we need to understand that beneath the different skin colors, hair colors, languages, body sizes, shapes and our thoughts, we are all made the same way. We cry when we are sad, we all want to be loved and protect our loved ones and we want to be understood.
So even the biggest geeks can create amazing things and the dreamers can be logical. The world is a big enough place for us to be human, and the labeling needs to stop. It's so interesting how during writing these pieces, I realized what I need ed to change about myself.