Recently I was at a party at my son’s house. It was family and his friends, and toward the end they started playing this game, What Do You Meme? It’s kind of like Apples to Apples. There is a picture and you have cards with funny captions, and you pick the caption you think best captures the picture for the person whose turn it is to judge. You win by having the most matches. Check it out, it’s fun.
The experience was humbling, playing as an older person with a group of sharp 30-somethings. There were occasional cultural references, some of a personal nature, that I had never heard. You know you are with good people when they can explain these things to you without shame.
There were references that were extremely funny to me that they didn’t appreciate, and vice versa. I actually did better than I thought predicting what young people would think was compelling. Overall, I learned from the differences in our perspectives. And we laughed a lot.
On the way home, I thought how seductive perception can be. We form our viewpoints from our experiences, which are fact. But how we interpret them is opinion, which is not fact. Our perspective is skewed by any number of things. It is easy, so easy, to think that because we believe it to be true, it is.
I was told recently that facts don’t matter, that perception is reality. Except that it is not. Perception is just an opinion that you think is true. Our responsibility is to check the facts and to submit our perspective to the community. When we test our theories and perspectives with people we trust, we can hear when we are being unfair, judgmental, or totally on point. We discern together the truth and how we can use it for the common good.
I am learning to check my perceptions, to be flexible in my perspectives and to be careful about how I construct my reality. The more we are in a safe and loving community, the easier this can be.