Sunday, June 1, 2014

Perceptions and Misperceptions


It’s interesting and challenging to be a person who apparently perceives the world differently than others.  I wonder whether it’s neurological, psychological, or something else.  I wonder, am I on “The Spectrum?”  I don’t know.  I just know that I seem to perceive the world differently than most people.  I apparently don’t make the same assumptions that other people make.  I’ve always liked to think that I wasn’t making the same stereotypical judgments that others were making, that I was outside their prejudices.  But how would I know?  I do know that I’ve often chosen non-standard answers to life questions.
 
When I was a around twenty, and pretty much a pacifist, my father asked:  “If someone attacked you, wouldn’t you defend yourself?”

I replied, “It would depend on what I wanted to accomplish.”

When I was in graduate school, a man from India asked me what I would do if I was adrift on the ocean in a boat with a friend, and we only had enough food for one of us.  I said I thought perhaps if we shared and tried hard, we might somehow both end up surviving.  He said, “That’s your Western approach.”  His approach was more like, he would drown himself so that I could survive.

People like to take their own attitudes as obvious—but there’s often a different way of looking at things.