At a recent house warming party, my friend got all heated up about her friend who didn’t know to wash chicken or vegetables before cooking them. She said, “everyone knows that you have to wash chicken and vegetables before cooking them!” and went on to tell us about how her friend was uneducated about the wonders of cooking.
It dawned on me that we make these “everyone knows….” statements and get frustrated when someone doesn’t know, thinking they must have been hiding under a rock or must live on another planet. But if it were true that everyone knew, then wouldn’t that one person know? Maybe that one person wasn’t the exception, but the rule. The rule being, “not everyone knows…..” or “some people know….”
Although the evidence is right in front of our face that not everyone knows – some do, some don’t – we get irritated while trying to force the rule on others instead of readjusting our perspective in light of new evidence. We cling to our rule and get all worked up about it.
And in this case, I asked my friend how many times she had eaten chicken and vegetables cooked by her friend before being told that they were not washed before entering the pot… She said many times. I asked her why “everyone knows” to wash vegetables and chicken before cooking them- and she said so that we don’t get diseases and die. And when I asked her if she had gotten a disease from each or any times that she ate the unwashed but cooked chicken and vegetables, she smiled and answered, “no. so I guess you don’t really have to wash the chicken and veggies every time. you can but it’s not as necessary as I thought, because the cooking process actually kills the germs.”
This is just chicken and veggies. Imagine all the other rules we’ve set up for ourselves and others to adhere to. “Common sense” isn’t common if there are people in the world who have no idea about it. “Everyone knows” doesn’t hold if at least one person doesn’t share that knowledge. We must keep an eye out for exceptions, so we can re-evaluate all of our faulty rules.
I dig this entry, Neecha. It’s really important to understand someone else’s reality before trying to enforce yours on them! It does make sense to wash chicken and vegetables, but it would be nice, rather than make a person feel like they are “wrong” for not doing it, to educate them as to why… then maybe their own common sense can come into play, and they will decide on their own self-determinism to do what makes sense, if it makes sense to them! 🙂