Perception is everything

I always believe that when I'm struggling with things in my life that it's the universe telling me that I'm supposed to be learning something that I haven't quite grasped yet.  Sometimes, that realization is enough to cause me to understand the lesson.

Sometimes, I'm quite a bit more stubborn than that.

But I can always count on the universe teaching me the lesson over and over and over and over again until I get the point.  It's really a lot of fun.... [rolling eyes]

You'd think by now I'd have learned to get it on the first try.... But noooooo.  Not me.  I'm pretty sure that I invented a new version of stubborn. 

Interestingly, that's not really the point of this post.  (Though it is a good point, now that I think about it...)

What is the point?

Funny you should ask.



The point of this post is that I've been getting hit in the head with the same lesson for at least a year now and I just don't seem to learn.  Now that I think about it, I've probably been stewing over this lesson for most of the 39 years that I've been on this earth.

Here's the thing that I can't seem to learn... Perception is everything.

Depending on your perspective, things change.  Learning to acknowledge that someone else might have a different truth than you because their perspective is different is difficult.  Particularly when, in your perspective, what they're saying or doing is wrong.

Not only acknowledging, but actually learning to adopt someone else's perspective in a situation or even to adopt a new perspective on an issue that you are struggling with in your own head is REALLY hard to do. 

I'll give you an easy and fun example. 

Women, open a box of crayons (don't cheat... not the 16 color kind.  The BIG box).  Take out a crayon that is periwinkle or cornflower or carnation or taupe.  Walk over to a man and ask him what color the crayon is.  Assuming that he's not an art director, artist, photographer or someone who works with color for a living, more likely than not, he's going to tell you that periwinkle is purple, cornflower is blue, carnation is pink and taupe is brown.

Men work in Windows 16.  They don't need more than the 16 basic colors. 

Now, if I say to a woman, "My new sofa is taupe", I'd bet she's got an accurate picture of the color in her head. 

We need shading.  We need the 256 color box of crayons (probably more if we can find it). 

Here's the thing, that carries over into the rest of our lives.  Into greyer areas.... (Mushroom, if you will....)

Our problem is that we keep trying to bring our shading into their 16 color world.  But you can't.  It's frustrating.  And we get frustrated.  Then we get upset.  And the men in our lives think that we're crazy. 

Hey, maybe we are....

But how do you get a man to understand?  Beats the heck out of me. 

I remember a certain incident where I was trying to explain to my ex (before he was my ex) that I wanted to paint our first apartment taupe.  He just kept looking at me and saying, "Brown?"

 He didn't get it.  I tried to explain it in words. 

Nope.  [cue crickets]

It wasn't until I stopped and realized that he wasn't trying to make me insane, but that he really didn't understand how taupe was different from brown until I took him to the paint store and lined up the browns (including taupe) and showed him which one was taupe, that he actually understood what I wanted and agreed with me. 

But on the way home, he said, "So, we're painting the walls brown?"

And I said, "Yep."

"Cool." 

Right.  Even though he knew the difference, to him, it was still brown.  I had to let go of the insistence on bringing him over to my side.  To how I wanted him to say it.  To think of it. 

He understood what I wanted.  And I stopped bugging him when he said that we had painted our apartment brown.  Because, in his perception, that's what we had done.

It's all about perception.  Where in your life are you insisting that other people conform to your perception rather than you conforming sometimes to theirs?  Are you ready to try to see it another way?

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