We often hear people proclaim or ourselves say that something is our truth or that it is our experience. Recognizing what is true for us is valid and important, as is acknowledging what we have perceived, but we often forget that our truth is not equivalent to the truth. Everything that we think and everything that we observe is filtered through the lens of our interpretation. We perceive things and have experiences, but our brains have been trained to process those experiences to give meaning. Finding meaning is very good, but we want to remember that the act of processing experience necessarily requires a modification and filtering of data. The full complexities of even a moment of perception are so richly immense that our brains are incapable of absorbing all of it, and so, we sift and sort, retaining some information and discarding the vast majority of it. This is not a criticism, but a reminder that our perceptions and experiences are no more and no less than our interpretation of them, and others will necessarily have different interpretations of the same or similar experiences and perceptions.
What do we do with this knowledge? Recognizing that everything is our interpretation, we can be more understanding of others and reduce the assumptions that we know what others are experiencing because we are experiencing the same thing. We can regain our curiosity and allow ourselves to discover what others’ interpretations are. We can look for opportunities that we usually miss because of our habitual interpretation of reality. And, we can choose to create and celebrate joy, without expecting it to come find us. We can deliberately choose to renew the amazement and wonder that we saw that this universe had when we were children.
This week’s video points to some profound truths, but that is merely my interpretation.
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