People either love sushi or hate it. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground. What I find particularly interesting is that some people will tell you they hate sushi even though they’ve never tried it.
I’ve never quite understood that. How can you know you dislike food you’ve never tasted?
But the more I think about it, the more I realize that people can be a lot like sushi.
Some people will like you almost immediately. Others won’t care for you at all. And some will decide they don’t like you before they’ve ever taken the time to get to know you.
Sometimes it has nothing to do with who you are. It might be the color of your skin, your political views, your religious beliefs, the way you dress, or any number of other things someone uses to form an opinion about you.
Consider a plate of sushi. To one person, it looks beautiful, fresh, and delicious. To another, it looks completely unappetizing. Both people are looking at the same thing, yet they see it very differently.
Is the sushi at fault?
Of course not. The sushi cannot change its appearance, its ingredients, or its nature to satisfy someone who has already decided they don’t like it. Nor can it convince someone to appreciate it simply by sitting there on the plate.
People are much the same. We cannot control how everyone sees us, and we certainly cannot make everyone like us. We can be kind, considerate, honest, and well-intentioned, yet someone may still find us disagreeable.
Sometimes, no matter what we do, we simply aren't that person's cup of tea — or plate of sushi.
I know a couple whose story illustrates this rather well. When they first met, she thought he was sarcastic, annoying, and just about the last person she would want to spend much time with.
Fast-forward a few decades, and they are grandparents who have shared a lifetime of love.
What happened?
Did he become an entirely different person? Perhaps he mellowed a little, but I suspect something else happened, too. She got to know him. She began to see qualities in him that she hadn't noticed before. The very things that once irritated her may have become familiar, amusing, or even endearing.
He became more valuable to her because she came to see him differently.
That is an important distinction. Sometimes people change, but sometimes our understanding of them changes. We discover things we couldn't see from a distance.
We find out that the person we dismissed has a sense of humor, a generous heart, a fascinating story, or a loyalty we never would have imagined.
Of course, not everyone we get to know will become a friend, and we don't have to like everyone. There are legitimate reasons to keep our distance from certain people. But there is a difference between deciding someone isn't right for us after getting to know them and deciding they aren't worth knowing in the first place.
Perhaps we would all benefit from being a little more willing to try the sushi.
We might discover that something we thought we would never like is actually pretty good. And we might discover that someone we once dismissed has something wonderful to offer.
After all, we cannot control how other people see us. But we can control how willing we are to look beyond first impressions when we meet them.
And who knows? Someone we don't particularly care for today might someday become one of the most important people in our lives.
The trouble isn’t always the meal—sometimes it’s simply that we've never take a bite.