Swift assumptions, rapid judgments, and being sure of what you think you know. I imagine we’re guilty of at least one of those things. It’s frustrating and it sometimes makes you feel like you’ve been caught in an illusion, but the truth remains: not everything is exactly as it seems.

Do you recall the dress that went viral a few years ago due to the “dispute” concerning its color? The main contenders were blue (+ black) and white (+ gold) - to me, the dress was always blue so I found it entertaining how people were seeing other things... Despite deducing this, I still observed the dress. It’s not that I wanted to see the impossibility of the dress changing color or something, I instead wanted to understand why there were separate conclusions about the “true” color of that dress. For those of us on the blue team, what weren’t we seeing? Well, this dress was studied and it’s true, the dress is blue (and black) - the reason people saw white as the dominant color was a scientific matter of shadows and lighting!

Now, say we put ourselves in a similar position to the group of those who saw white but in a completely different scenario; basically where there is a different perspective than the one you have in a situation that seems so obvious:

You sight a group of people looking intently at the sky and a plane goes by. Your instant thought would probably be that they were plane enthusiasts or the plane was really loud so it naturally grabbed their attention. Plot twist: they were actually trying to spot the ISS (International Space Station) flying by, but you didn't see that one of the people staring at the sky was holding their ISS tracker because of where you were standing when you sighted the group. So, you thought you saw something because it added up - I mean they were literally looking at the sky as a plane simultaneously passed by, what else could it have been?! 

That example might seem silly and menial, but what if we were in a situation where we assumed something that could potentially be destructive or problematic, that could lead to us acting based on what we think we saw? For instance, if you see an odd encounter between two people and you assume one of them hurt the other, you’d probably act on that. Doing this could quickly culminate in serious consequences. The obvious and probably the best thing to do is to clarify before acting, but do we always remember to do that?!!

I’m discussing this today because sometimes we drive ourselves crazy trying to figure obscure things out, fixating on what we do and/or don’t see. Just because not everything is illusory, doesn’t mean all is straightforward. I mean, it took science to explain the color of a dress - this instance embodies the fact that multidimensionality and the omnipresence of perspectives show that there are other sides to a story, other interpretations; each time we conclude, we’re just picking a side, a white or a blue dress.

Until the next one

- C