Half the time, I don’t know what I’m talking about. No matter what anybody tells me, it’s only one perception of a story that has multiple facets. Sometimes, I make the mistake of swallowing another’s perception whole, shifting my own point of view over to theirs, which is sheer laziness, abandoning my ability to evaluate situation from my own perspective.

“Do tell! Why, you poor thing. You never… they never… really!?” This is one way that gossip is born. Then, because my own perceptions are inescapable, my judgments and assumptions warp the story into fiction, assumed to be truth.

“I got it straight from the horse’s mouth.” “I trust you, I believe you.” “If you hate X, then I hate X too.”

I’m so annoyed by the knee-jerk way I adopt others’ opinions as my own without thinking. I’m conditioned to call that ‘friendship’. Abandon my brain, abandon what I know to be true, i.e. that there are not just two but many sides to any story. How person A feels about or perceives person B is not necessarily how I should perceive that person. It is quite possible for me to like two people who hate each other.

As I struggle to break free of archaic rules of obligation and friendship, I find myself tangled in others’ mixed perceptions. Who to believe? Who is telling the truth? Is it either-or? No, it’s both-and.

Really, it doesn’t matter. I can’t know who’s ‘right’. There IS no ‘truth’, only stories. Someone tells me his story, and I can empathize with his pain and support his feelings without reinforcing his point of view or allowing him to corral my consensus. Another tells me her story and I can do the same. No right. No wrong. Just people, their pain and pleasure.

Life might be so simple if only we could find easy answers to complicated problems of human relationships. We believe that life IS simple, it’s just a question of finding the right formula, the magic pill to render and purify problems down to their component elements so we may choose correctly without fear of mistake.

Life is not simple, it’s chaotically and fractally complex. It only becomes simple in practice if we surrender to its inherent mystery. There are no sides to choose. There are only shifting points of view and fascinating stories to listen to, share and learn from.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 11:04 am and is filed under 100 Words, truth and strangeness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.