Up in the Air

Hi and welcome back to “A Dare a Day”! On a plane coming home from a business trip, I watched a movie called, “Up in the Air” starring George Clooney. It’s a pretty good movie with some good messages, one of which I’d like to discuss today.

The premise of the movie is about a man, Ryan Bingham (played by Clooney) who is a professional corporate downsizer. He works for a company that is called in to fire people. His job keeps him traveling around the country almost year round. This life style of self imposed isolation is one that Bingham embraces.

During one part of the movie, where he is teaching a new coworker about smart travel, he states, “Never get behind old people. Their bodies are littered with hidden metal and they never seem to appreciate how little time they have left. Bingo, Asians. They pack light, travel efficiently, and they have a thing for slip on shoes. Gotta love 'em.” His coworker responds, “That’s stereotyping.” Bingham responds,” I'm like my mother, I stereotype. It's faster.”

This dialogue in the movie made me smile because it had such a ring of truth to it. We like to place people and things into proverbial “bins” with labels so that we don’t’ have to think beyond the label we’ve given them. We assume they are all the same and that makes life easier for us. Many times, we even place ourselves in these bins because then we “belong” somewhere. If I say, “I am a liberal or a conservative” then I have a “team”. I have a crowd I am following and if I get too tired to think for myself, I’ll just listen to what they tell me to think.

While stereotyping can make some things “faster” it also is harmful to our sense of connectivity to the rest of the world. The reason I particularly enjoyed this interaction between Bingham and his coworker is because I thought it went deeper than just showing her how to travel efficiently. It was also very telling of the life of isolation he had built for himself. Stereotyping fragments life. It disconnects things from each other and us from other things. It promotes “you” vs. “me” and ”us” vs. “them”.

We do this even with our days, don’t we? When I ask someone how they are doing and they sigh and say, “Well, it’s ‘Monday’”, that person has put Mondays in a bin. I often wonder what it would be like if we had no names for the days. What if there was no such thing as “Mondays” and we actually just looked at each day as its own separate wonderful day…a day where anything can happen?

The truth of the matter is, just as each moment is precious and unique, so are we. As author Dan Millman states, “There are No Ordinary Moments”. I would add there are no ordinary people, animals, or days or anything! Everything has its own magic that is just waiting for us to discover it.

For today, I dare you to be aware of instances where you might be stereotyping. You might think to yourself, “I don’t discriminate.” Stereotyping and discrimination are not exactly the same although discrimination does begin by stereotyping. Discrimination is stereotyping taken to an evil extreme. It’s really more about the unfair treatment of people you’ve placed in a particular “bin”. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so important to be mindful of those bins!

For now, simply be aware of those instances as they occur. Don’t judge yourself. Just calling attention to certain things and shining a light on them is sometimes enough to start turning them around. In doing this exercise myself, I was really surprised to see how many times I found myself doing this. As I caught myself, I would smile and say, “There it is.”

Thanks for reading today and for daring to dare!