A very simple thing happened today that helps me explain a common phenomenon in human interactions: I waited too long to eat and was starving!! So when I made myself a hotdog, it tasted like THE BEST HOTDOG I HAD EVER TASTED!!! Was it the best? No. Why did it taste that way? Because my perception of the hotdog changed based on my experience. This was very real to me! The hotdog tasted great!! But I could step back and reason that it didn’t make sense for it to taste so great because it was the same brand hotdog I had had many times before, cooked the same way. I knew that the reason why it tasted so much better today was because of my extreme hunger.
While this is easy to understand when it comes to something like food tasting better when we’re hungry…its more difficult to apply to our other human interactions. We don’t realize how often our perception of something…words spoken, someone’s behavior, a situation, …is colored by our own experiences. We think we are perceiving what is real…while we are merely perceiving what seems real to us, based on our own experience.
So what do we do? Always doubt our perceptions of everything? Not at all. Merely having a certain humble self-awareness that there may be another side to what I see can help us be open to another’s equally valid perceptions. It can open doors to real communication and help avoid a lot of needless arguing. Good communication is not just expressing how I feel. That’s self-expression. Communication involves each person being open to the other’s thoughts, views, feelings as being equally valid to one’s own. It also involves knowing that what we communicate may not be received by the other as we intended. Of course whatever I say makes perfect sense to me! That’s why I’m saying it! But communication involves another, and so doesn’t end with my perfectly stated point. How is the other person receiving what I’m saying? Are they getting something other than what I intended? A good communicator is always looking to try and find this out…and always willing to adjust their communication accordingly…trying to achieve mutual understanding.
We can’t be satisfied with staying in the enclosed world of our own great-tasting hotdog… just expecting everyone else to understand why its so great…and thinking its “their problem” if they don’t! We need to make efforts to understand and to adjust our words and actions to be more understood, if possible. Life this side of heaven will never be perfect communication! But at least we can make efforts with God’s grace to build bridges. That’s the only way to get ready for the family reunion that heaven will be!
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