I thought it a bit serendipitous that THINK showed up as the biggest word. Because, really, I suspect that thinking is the key to everything.
How do you come up with solutions to problems? You think about the issue at hand.
How do you learn to understand other people’s feelings? Think about what it must be like to be in their shoes. By that, I mean you need to think not only about how they actually see things through their eyes, but how they perceive things with their brain. What is their perspective? Why do they do what they do, when/how they do it? Why do they see things so differently than you do? Why can’t they see or feel the things you feel? Why don’t they care about the “why” of things like you do?
That’s a lot of questions, right?
During my mother-in-law’s (MIL’s) recent visit, I asked a lot of questions. I didn’t just ask her questions, I puzzled over a bunch of stuff in my head, too. There are many things about my family that I have struggled over the years to understand. The more I think about stuff, the better I am able to comprehend things. Not just physical things, either. Ideas. Perspectives. Attitudes, for better or worse.
I may not have arrived at all of the answers, but I am at least better-equipped to form new, perhaps temporary, hypotheses. Some of those are more accurate than others. Some are pretty far-fetched, too.
We, as people, tend to take an awful lot of stuff for granted. We assume people are all basically like ourselves. That we all have the same ability to think, to reason, to comprehend. But we don’t. People are all wired differently. The differences could be physical (brain structure) and/or mental (brain signals). The tricky thing is that we cannot see those differences, so it takes longer to figure out. It requires a little bit of effort, too.
What kind of effort? Thought. It really is as simple as that.
Hubby, Mike, and I have been married for almost 27 years. It’s always been obvious to me that we are very different in a lot of ways, but I have only recently begun to understand just how different.
Here’s a simple example. A month or so ago, out of the blue, he asked me why, when I put the TV remote back on the endtable (where it “belongs”) every night, I lay it upside-down.
“I don’t put it there it upside-down,” I told him. “At least not on purpose.”
I know I can a bit scatter-brained, so adding that “not on purpose” qualifier is important.
I assumed that, by “upside-down,” he meant like this…
Nope, he meant this.
“What makes that upside-down?” I asked.
“The top of the remote should be pointing at the TV, not the other way.”
”Um… why?” I asked. “So, when I want to turn the TV on, I don’t have to pick it up, I just have to reach over and hit the power button. When you put the buttons here, upside-down like this, I have to pick the remote up, turn it around, and then hit the power,” he explained as he demonstrated.
I had to laugh. I mean, I never would have thought about making sure I lay the buttons down so they were pointing at the TV. I’m usually just happy remembering to put them back in the “right” spot.
Really, I would never think that. It’s a good thing we have each other, eh?
