Yesterday my youngest was home with the coughy crud that seems to be hitting hard and early this year. As we sat across from each other watching our 743rd episode of Lego Ninjago (are they humans or snakes? I still don’t know…) we ate our lunch.
As he ate his soup, with the box of crackers between us, he said
“These little crackers would be good with tomato soup, because that’s what the box shows.”
“No honey, that’s chili I said.”
“No. It is really red with. It’s tomato soup”
He was annoyed, that I thought he didn’t know what tomato soup was.
“Hon, chili is red too. It is lumpy and has beans but it is red.”
Now I’m thinking I need to make chili more often so this kid can identify what chili looks like!
“No, it is soup” he said with a finality I knew the discussion was over.
I grabbed the box of crunchy carby saltiness that is my absolute kryptonite.
I turned the box to reach in and saw …
We were both 100% right, but how would we have known what each others perspective was.
I believed I knew what he was seeing and was wrong. He knew what he was seeing and knew I was wrong.
And in fact, we were both correct.
How often do we truly think we know the perspective someone is coming from? But the reality, is we don’t. We know our own truth, our own path, our own reality. Even someone less than 5 feet away may be experiencing the world around them differently.
Choose grace,
choose kindness,
choose being happy instead of being right.
We can never really know through what perspective someone may be living.
