Can you walk a mile in my shoes?

As someone who loved To Kill a Mocking Bird, I was quite taken with the quote "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view […] until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.". However, forty odd years later, T.I raises a slightly different aspect, in his song Ready for Whatever, when he says he can't be judged (by the listener) for what he's done because he thought he didn't have a choice, given what had happened in his life, and how it framed his decision making, and he ends with: 

'You'll have to put yo self in my position

You can't expect me to think like you 
'Cause my life ain't like yours’

As someone who strives for empathy, I had a startling realisation to the truth of this statement while in Vietnam. I was reading a lot about the country, and I had started reading The Trader from Saigon by Lucy Cruickshanks.

Over the years, I've read a lot about the fall of Singapore and a lot of books set in Malaysia both during the war and after, however the Vietnam war was quite new to me, so I read a few books on the journalists and the fall of Saigon and then picked the Cruickshanks book because it wasn't focused on the war, and the rich Vietnamese history is so much more than that period.

Part of the story focuses on the rationing, and a stolen ration book. So it was that poverty post war, and familiar territory.  I'd read about 150 pages into the book when I suddenly noticed this on the back cover:

I was stunned for a minute while I recalibrated the setting. In my head, the book was set in the late 40's, not the mid 1980's! It completely threw me. Logically, I could see I'd just moved history around in a nonsensical fashion, but if you talk ration books, my brain immediately jumps to WWII, not late ‘70’s. All the other books I'd read set in Asia are referring to WWII if they are post war. 

Without the actual date mentioned, or defining situation, my brain just furnished the fictional world in dress and setting of the late '40's. It took what it knew, what it had learned over the course of my life, all my knowledge and put it into the world I was reading about. And it was wrong. Very, very wrong.

We are the sum total of every life experience we have, every lesson we are taught in school, everything we read and see, and it frames our world view, often without us even knowing. It's so ingrained, it taints every we see and think, and we're often completely unaware it's filtering our thoughts. Maybe we can't really ever walk a mile in someone else's shoes. However, we can and should, try.

If someone chooses to leave everything they know, there must be a very good reason. If they choose to risk their life fleeing, there must be little or no safer option. Maybe we need to understand more of their actual life, rather than sitting making judgments from our cosy living rooms. We can’t have a proper understanding if we are furnishing their world like ours, and giving them options and choices they really don’t have the luxury to make. As T.I says, we can’t really think like them if our life isn’t like theirs. And thankfully, for so many of us, it isn’t.

Linking with #BooknificentThursdays