I was having this conversation with a couple of my friends in a park one weekend about drawing conclusions on people especially when it comes to their negative habits.

One of my friends said she was sitting at a bus stop waiting for a bus one day. She had just bought coffee at a nearby shop. As she sat, she suddenly looked around and couldn’t find her coffee which she was sure she had placed besides her on the seat at the bus stop. As she raised her head, she realised the person sitting next to her was sipping some coffee.

She thought of creating an incident, but had to hold her breath for a while. She looked at the gentleman and thought of how mean he was. Taking someone’s coffee without even asking in a very cold morning like this was more than ungrateful. He is mean! She quietly said to herself. The man was nicely dressed and did not even look like someone in need. 

The man sipped, turned around and smiled at her, but she returned the smile with an evil grin. Rather than looking away, the gentleman asked her if everything was okay! Burning with anger and thinking what a saddist this man was, she bundled herself to tell him who he really was.

Lo! The bus signaled and she jumped up to safe herself from such a despicable person only for the gentleman to rush behind her with another cup of coffee. “Hey Ma’am! You left your coffee on the sit”. That’s when she realised her bag was hiding her own coffee on the other side. He handed her the coffee with a smile and entered the bus. Oh boy…what will you do in this situation? 

We usually draw conclusions about people on first sight or when we know very little about them. My friend did just that. You may draw conclusions on my friend as well as the man may also do same. We all know now that the man is far from being what my friend took her for.

We draw conclusions about the lives of people from pictures, their relationship statuses and even simple status messages or graphics that they post on social media. I am not refusing that people don’t post things about their lives especially on social media. However, if you take a deep thought about these things, you will realise that what you feel about people may or may not be what they’re actually going through. 

Drawing conclusions about people may lead you into taking bad or rash actions. We need to be able to distinguish between what we observe and what we assume.

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