Attention & Discernment: It may be true that some people, when asking this, don’t mean well. But they might also be curious. It’s not binary, and therein lies how well each of us attends to, listens, and discerns the intent of the question. If you’ve decided that any question formulated like this means ill toward you, my guess is you’re missing out on making friends who were once strangers. (And all friends were once strangers.)

These days I live in Minneapolis. When people ask me where I’m from, maybe (probabilistically) they’re expecting to hear a neighborhood or suburb nearby. However, then I get to share how I grew up thousands of miles, oceans away from here, in Africa and Asia, and yet how I’ve made this my home. And that is the beginning of a conversation and maybe a relationship.

Thanks for sharing Vincent Garcia