One day, sitting across the dining table that you shared with someone for 20 years, eating the same pancakes that you make every sunday, you start wondering, “do I really know this person?” The thought comes to your mind because last night your partner came late and directly went to sleep without discussing how the evening went. It was odd, you were used to always talking about the day before sleeping, so when that didn’t happen, you started wondering, “why”. A little deviation from the routine and everything that you did together starts crumbling down, you start seeing the hidden meanings that never needed to be looked at before.
For me the most terrifying thing in the world is to know someone completely, I barely know myself, I don’t think I can know someone else for who they really are. What we do at best is to take someone on faith, a belief that he/she will be the person who we imagine to be. Every relationship we enter into, be it friendship or love, we go with a blind spot.
I remember a game I used to always play as a kid, we would all look at the clouds and guess what the shape of the cloud was. I still remember it because it was weird how each one of us could really imagine a different shape of the same cloud. The objects we see in real life are the same but our perception of what object a cloud could look like differed completely. But that’s not the most bizarre part, the most interesting part about this game was that when one kid pointed out, “look it surely looks like an elephant, even if you thought it was a whale, somewhere in your head, you start trying to find the resemblance to an elephant and most of the time even agree with it, especially when the kid was the leader of the gang.
Our entire lives are built upon a tower of perceptions, we make friends with someone because we perceive that person to be of our liking, we get into a relationship because we think we are compatible with a caveat that even if we are not 100% match, each will make an attempt to meet halfway by changing themselves.
Honestly, we can never really know a person, and I feel it’s more because people don’t truly know themselves. How many times your friends or partner do things you least expected and you feel shocked, sometimes pleasantly shocked and sometimes unpleasantly. How many times you surprise yourself with your behaviour. Who we are, what we like, I feel they are such redundant questions that we should really stop asking. Things I liked eating as a kid, I no longer enjoy them, so how can I even expect myself to know what other foods people like. People in a relationship sometimes take pride in knowing what their partner’s favourite food is and I practically laugh at that thought. Sometimes we claim to know everything about a person and that person also plays along in order to not break the feel good bubble.
We are all living with emotional blindspots – basing our life on faith, just like the spots we cannot see when we are driving a car, still we hit the pedal, steer the wheel, make a silent prayer and hope for the best.
