How To Accept Differences

Perception is far more important than reality.

My seventeen year-old son James and I were talking about playing tennis this weekend and our focus went to how it feels to hit a tennis ball with the racquet. I described it as similar to swinging a badminton racquet with the strings and the sweet spot removed from the grip by a stem. He described the feeling as similar to swinging a ping pong paddle with the strings and the sweet spot connected and adjacent to the grip.

It surprised us both that the other could perceive the experience differently when the tennis racquets we actually play with have an identical design. Neither of us had ever considered that anyone could perceive the experience differently. We concluded that the likely reason behind it was that I learned tennis in the early 1970’s when the racquets were made of wood and actually had a stem between the strings and the grip and he learned tennis in the early 2000’s when the fiberglass racquets all had oversized heads.

This is a very simple illustration of a very important concept. Perceptions of anything and anyone are different for each of us. If simple physical objects appear different to each of us, imagine how differently invisible objects appear to us, like electricity, magnetism, wind, heat, heaviness, gravity, the Law of Attraction, the size of the universe, our health, death, love, and God.

Certainly, if our perceptions are different, then our emotional responses will be different as well. Our emotions around objects, ideas, and personalities can vary from comfort to discomfort, worry to ease, fear to hope, love to ... well, lack of love.

Jumping into a swimming pool and feeling the relative temperature of the water appear differently to each of us, just as jumping into a relationship, a new career, or a new idea. Our perception about our existing relationships, our health, money, our role at work, and our role in the world will also be different. We all have comfort levels and fears around different things and experiences. Clearly this has something to do with our past experiences too, and none of us have had identical past experiences.

The bottom line is this: accept that each of has a different perspective and perception about everything. That is okay. In fact that is wonderful. That is what allows living on this planet to be such a spectacular experience. Don’t waste any time trying to gets everyone else to agree with you, because based on their differing perception they never truly can exactly agree anyway.

There is so much to experience, and so many types of individuals to experience it with. Enjoy the journey with people that somewhat agree with you and have similar perceptions about the world, but also enjoy the journey with people who have completely differing perceptions about the world and seem to disagree about most things.

This kind of puts an interesting spin on the ideas of religion and politics, doesn’t it?