JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: A FLAW WE NEED TO FIX

Earlier today, something happened while I was at the bus terminal that made me reflect deeply on how easily we as humans often jump to conclusions. This is something many of us do unconsciously, whereby we might see something and assume we fully understand it and immediately form an opinion or judgment on it without concrete facts, while we know nothing about it. I'm no saint in this; in fact, I'm guilty myself, especially today, and I feel the need to talk about it.

So on arriving at the bus terminal, I boarded a bus and immediately picked a comfortable seat. Not long after that, a woman came in and picked a seat next to mine. Not long after entering the bus alongside other passengers, she tapped me and asked if I could help her watch her bag while she quickly stepped out to buy something. Without thinking much about it, I nodded, but a few minutes after she left, a thought came to my mind that got my mind racing.

I had remembered how it was said in the news from about a decade ago that unknown individuals walk into bus terminals and drop their bags only for them to explode not long after. What crept into my mind was, what if that woman was a terrorist? What if she has a bomb planted in her bag? Would it go off now or in the next few minutes? With the fear that gripped me, I quickly stepped down and walked a short distance away from the bus without raising any alarm, while I was still monitoring the bag from afar like I was expecting it to explode any moment from then.

It never did; instead, not long after that, the bus was full and ready to leave, but the woman still wasn't in sight, making my suspicion rise more and more. After the driver realized the lady who owns the bag was nowhere to be found, he threatened to throw her bag away and pick up another passenger. Just then, an elderly woman in the bus spoke up, pleading with the driver to be patient because the woman in question was her daughter-in-law, and she had only gone into the market to buy a few things. On hearing this, my mind was at peace with the assurance that a terrorist wouldn't want to bomb her mother-in-law, so my suspicions were false.

But guess what? About thirty minutes since the woman left without returning, just like before, my mind began to cook up another theory, or should I call it propagation, regarding this same woman, such as what Is this one of those wicked wives who hate their mother-in-law? What if she intentionally brought her here to abandon her as payback for something she did wrong? At this point I can't help but wonder how all of these thoughts keep coming to my mind, because it's becoming intense by the minute, and if I had a chance I could easily write a whole movie script out of it.

After about an hour, the said woman came panting and sweating with loads of goods on her head, showing that in truth she had clearly gone to buy things in the market and lost track of time in the process. While I must say it's wrong for her to hold other passengers to ransom via her act, I must say she's lucky everyone was considering the fact of the elderly woman, and that's why we waited for her to show up, since she did pick up her calls when called and told her she was coming. But then in the end all my stories and suspicions were completely dissolved; there was no bomb, nor was there an abandonment. Instead, all we had was a woman trying to get something done.

I couldn't help but shake my head at myself for how quick I was to judge her and how fast I was to fill in the blanks with fears, doubt, and negativity. While I know what I did wasn't right, even though I didn't say any of them out loud, I'm sure many of us also do this either silently or by speaking up about what we made assumptions on without hearing the full story.

My reflection today taught me about the need to pause and give people the benefit of the doubt, because sometimes our imagination can be louder than the reality, especially if we don't learn to control it. We live in a world and time when a lot of people are often being misunderstood, where we condemn before trying to understand, where people's actions are constantly misread. While it might seem like I'm pointing fingers, I want you to understand I'm doing that to myself first, because we all really need to do better and learn to think more of compassion and less of suspicion, because the people you're suspecting might just be random people lost in thoughts of their life worries.

All photos are mine.