I recently got back from traveling for a little over a month. I needed a change in my life so I quit my job and booked tickets to visit a couple European countries. I saw a lot of cool things, walked a whole bunch, and met a lot of interesting people.

Those people are what I am thinking about today.

I think a lesson that really hit home for me over this trip was to not make assumptions, or to be more specific, judgements on people. Its that lesson that i’m sure everyone knows intellectually but in practice its a bit harder.

take for example a Norwegian guy i met in Amsterdam. He was older by a couple of decades than everyone in the hostel and had a slur to his words all hours of the day that suggested he was a good friend of the bottle. Now, i liked this guy off the bat, but i did write him off as just an older party guy. We all know the type, friends with everyone, but more of somebody everyone laughs at and not with.

yet on what turned out to be his last day in the hostel, i sat down in the common room next to him to eat my lunch and started asking him about his life. Turns out this dude was a very talented musician who owned a libraries worth of vinyl and several guitars of the quality that makes more sense in a museum, and he played them regularly. Now i was surprised to say the least, seeing how he lit up when talking about the jazz artists he loved (if your wondering his fave is Miles Davis) and just generally seeing a side of this person i did not expect to be there. It was lovely and really threw me for a loop because of all the previous judgements i had made about this person. I instantly felt both guilty about those judgements and glad that i knew this new side of him.

This sort of thing happened enough times over the last month so that the lesson really hit home for me in a way that i don’t think it would have otherwise. Its really not fair to people i meet for me to pass judgements in the way that i was doing with the Norwegian guy, he deserved better, and if i had not asked more about him i would have not seen this side of him.

Hopefully i can take this lesson forward with me into my life at home. I’m grateful for the lesson and look forward to meeting more lovely people, hopefully with less judgement on my part.