Our last official challenge came to a close Friday, June 17 and I still can’t believe we’ve made it through six challenges in the City of Detroit as a cohort. This last one in particular was a bit challenging (no pun intended) for my team specifically; having to deal with conflicting opinions from a community we didn’t predict to be as complicated as it really was.

This speaks to a lot of what we deal with going through Challenge Detroit as Fellows. We go into a challenge at the start of the five weeks feeling good, possibly wanting to bounce back from the previous challenge, and ready to learn a different aspect of the city. All of these emotions and pre-conceived notions are built up in our heads, each of us bringing a different lens to the microscope. As we start to examine the challenge, our partner, and the community from a more magnified perspective, we learn things we never could’ve predicted.

This is and always will be a great reminder of how you can be as prepared as you think possible for something in front of you, but when you really dig down and understand what is making that thing tick or that issue grow, you realize how wrong you ever were for trying to judge it or put a label on it. Through this fellowship, I’ve learned to appreciate things at more than face value and continuously strive to remember that things are definitely not always how they seem. It is up to you, as a human being, to try your best to empathize with the person/situation/thing in front of you, so that you don’t make the grave mistake in thinking that you know everything about it before you’ve even begun to understand it.

I think we get away with this, as a society, looking at the surface level for answers and affirmations to our pre-conceived beliefs, but do we actually take the time out to truly understand what is really happening or how something got to where it is now? Do we even challenge our own beliefs before we begin to challenge others?

I think it is very important in being a genuinely good person to really go beyond your pre-determined beliefs or what the media is telling you and try to expand beyond that by making yourself uncomfortable and maybe hearing things you might not want to hear. As narcissistic beings, we never want our opinions/beliefs/ideas to be insulted or questioned because we know our motivations and we know we are typically good, but that’s where fault lies. Once again, are we taking the time to understand something before we pass judgment on it? My only advice to myself and others wondering the same thing is: Be a human. Take time to listen to someone else or learn something new. You can never be overeducated (or overdressed for that matter).

Thanks, Challenge Detroit, for this important life lesson.

kermit