Every time this thought crosses my mind, it comes to me as if it has something new within it – a fresh element or at least a different nuance. Our lives, starting with our thoughts, revolve around perception. The Smiths might want bigger and better and more, because they see that the Joneses have that. The Smiths think the Joneses are happier, more successful, richer. (The Joneses might be on the bones of their arse, co-existing because it’s easier than separating and always fighting over how to deal with a credit card debt that Evil Kinevel couldn’t jump over.) The Smiths might spend much of their lives wanting what the Joneses seem to have, only to have their perceptions shaken when they travel and see others who have smaller and inferior and less – and yet are happier.
Then there’s the ever-present issue of judgement. It’s very hard to get past the stage where you judge what people think of you by what you think of them. In a meeting, you might have fleeting thoughts that colour the way you answer people when they ask a question. I’ve had a run-in with that person before and I just know that he is thinking. I can see it on his face! Reality could be quite different. He could be thinking about the fight he had with his wife this morning, worrying about the indigestion that he can’t seem to shift, brooding about the dangerous antics of a crazed driver on the way to workor even mentally practising the times table. He could be thinking about very little and his face has just settled into a pensive look. Have you ever taken something the wrong way because you were expecting a certain reaction from a certain person? No? Never?
Who knows, really, what other people are thinking? Even if they share their thoughts it’s likely that some editing will occur in the telling.
So our perceptions have very little to do with actuality. With reality. With truth.
It’s more like politics. We put our spin on everything to make it fit into our world, whatever that is. To make it make sense – to us, at least. But in doing so we are living a fairytale, a story … a lie. We are forever working on an image of our life, our world, complete with our own filters and enhancements. Just the fact that there are eternal optimists and pessimists should have given us a hint long ago that we all colour the world we live in by our thoughts.
Perhaps perception is humanity’s fatal flaw and we cannot totally change because this is the way we have always operated. Still, there would be great value in recognising that the thoughts we have are not based on actuality. If we could truly grasp this, our world might shift on its axis a ilttle and nothing would ever be the same again. That’s my perception of the issue, anyway.