Life Shapes Our View

“The darkest night in someone's life may be the brightest day in another person's life. Life rests on perceptions and conceptions or missed perceptions and misconceptions.” ― Israelmore Ayivor

I have been in the technology field for over 38 years and feel I have stayed pretty close to the leading curve of all things new and cool. The advances being made in all fields of human progress continue to grab my interest and time. Even new music, trends and ways of thinking how we live our lives.

But I have a confession on this perfect late summer morning.

We still have a house phone cradled in its base. In our defense, it is not attached to the wall in our kitchen with a rotary dial and fifteen foot long twisted cord connecting the hand set to the base unit. It is a hand held and we have remote hand sets in various rooms of the house.

This phone serves 98% of the time as a place for telemarketers to waste their automated call time selling great insurance deals, lowering my credit card rates and attempts to ensure my Microsoft operating system license is fully paid for. Caller ID and the answering machine make for a great way to monitor and ignore the calls.

The blinking yellow message light, blinking, blinking, blinking.

Each hand held has a small yellow LED light that blinks when a message is left. It is very easy to push the key sequence on the phone to delete the messages. Some days it is part of my regular bed time routine. Many nights though I forget to delete the daily messages and fall blissfully asleep.

In the darkness of night there are moments I wake to this bright yellow beacon filling the room. It might as well be a road construction warning light sitting on the dresser. Seriously, one night in half sleep I combined the rumble of our AC unit and the yellow light into wondering why a garbage truck was parked outside of our home. My wife barely notices it.

And there it is, how we perceive things in life.

One definition of perceiving is to interpret or look on (someone or something) in a particular way. Shes perceives the light as nothing more than the small dimly lit LED that it is. I perceive it to be a lighthouse guarding ships from coastal dangers. Her view is perfectly normal and rational. Mine is probably exaggerated.

In an article by Gregg Henriques, Ph.D., professor of psychology at James Madison University titled Perception and Perceptual Illusions, he states "Through experience, the mind/brain builds perceptual categories of objects. ... The matching process is what gives us the experience of figure/ground relationships."

Our life experience has us wired differently.

If we read Twitter, Facebook, opinion columns and listen to all of the noisy differences, one might wonder how we accomplish anything. The conversation can be good for advancing humanity, but we need to understand how we perceive one thing is perceived differently by others.

One could apply my blinking yellow message light to current politics. What I may view as bombastic deception, another will view as quiet guidance. Our frame of reference is simply different.

In our haste to send off eye popping Tweets only results in widening our divide. Maybe the starting point should be acknowledging the difference. If we try to perceive things slightly different we can lessen the divide.

Maybe that little yellow message light is warning us.

Stay inspired my friends!