Don't Assume Bad Intent

[Sorry if this is a bit jumbled: I have to go to work, and I don't have time to edit it.
My leg started to ache after four hours on my feet yesterday, so I left early. I'm thrilled to say it doesn't hurt this morning, so I'm working shorter but more days this week.]

The Hidden Brain podcast "Creative Differences" is about the effect of a person's close contact with people who are different from themselves on that person's creativity.

More contact seems to correlate to more creativity--but the contact has to be intimate--a love relationship with a foreigner, or living in another country, not just visiting.

That feels right to me. I think a key to creativity is knowing that things could be different.
Like Apple ad from the late '90s, "Think different". 

Meeting people whose thinking is aligned with an entirely different set of standards and even facts has been key for me.

In my twenties, I was involved with bink, who came from a poor, working-class family. That's an example of being close to someone different and NOT seeing their difference––not letting it crack my facade––largely, I think, because as an aspiring artist, bink had realigned herself with the creative class. I'm sorry to say, for instance, I couldn't fully understand when she talked about the distress that caused her.

In my mid-thirties, I was involved with an actual foreigner: an upper-middle–class Englishman (my former Classics prof). His thinking was soooo different from mine, sometimes I couldn't make any sense of it. I could not fathom, for instance, how someone with a PhD could support a monarchy and an all-male priesthood. In trying to understand him, I came to see these beliefs of his were often more about social allegiance than intellectual processes––and that the same is true for me.

That was a shock, and it worked to pull the facing off the structure of my thinking to reveal the supports below:
I believe in X,Y, Z because my people do, not because I even truly understand X, Y, Z well enough to know what I think, independently.

Once you see that, you know, a-ha! It could be different.
I could be different. And that opens up possibilities.

I'm in another country, to some extent, at work.

I've been keeping my options open with my coworker Mr. Furniture––a self-taught artist and a Black Panther Party sympathizer. A commenter here had insisted he was hostile, based on things I've reported Mr Furniture has said. The things he says can sound hostile, written out. 

But like a lot of the guys I work with, Mr Furniture came up in generational poverty, then in gangs, has since reformed himself, and practically everything he and these guys say sounds rough and tumble to me.

I know that I'm a foreigner among them and that I just don't get them. So over the past year, I've mostly laid low and tried to observe what they DO, how they ACT, and not judge what they say so much.
Mr. Linens even told me,
"Don't listen to anything I say!"

This is the reverse of how I grew up, in an academic family in a college town where people were judged by what we said, by how we presented ourselves in words.

I took as my guide the saying, Don't assume bad intent.
(Wiser, I think, than the advice to assume good intent. Just don't assume anything!)

It was a shock to me when I first worked among people who weren't primarily word based.  That was when I worked at the Basilica as weekend sacristan. (I was old. Forty!)Many people I came in close contact with at the Basilica were in business of some way––accountants, tax lawyers, small- and even large-business owners––and many came from blue collar backgrounds. 

Plenty of them were wealthy, but not well educated. They would not know what to me were basic facts, like where Yugoslavia was.
In my family, this was practically a sin. 

BUT... they would bring you soup if you were sick, and think nothing of it, even if you weren't a close friend of theirs.
My parents never did good deeds like that. (Or, if they did, they thought something of it––it was a big deal, it signified something.)

I had to reconfigure how I judged people. 

This has been helpful working with Mr Furniture and the other guys. They are friendly to me in the way they treat me, even if not in words.
Yesterday, I was shocked that Mr Furniture complimented me in words--not directly, but in my hearing. He was telling a pal of his that he'd gotten some Black Panther patches from eBay.
"How did you find those?" the pal asked.

"Well," Mr F said, "we have the best book lady, and she found them."

And now, I have to go.