I was discussing with a couple of colleagues recently about how we live in our own heads and how our perception of reality is actually very subjective and at times dead wrong. This discussion brought me to recall, somewhat painfully, how I learned about the subjectivity of what we believe to be real.

The first case wasn’t that painful; it was at a Coldplay concert with my daughter Kaitlin which was a great experience for several reasons but it did teach me that you can’t always believe what you think you saw or heard. This “illusion” happened while we were listening to the concert but I didn’t realize that it was an illusion until after we were discussing it on the way home.  If you’re at all a fan of Coldplay, you may be familiar with their album X&Y; on that album, there are two songs, “Swallowed in the Sea” and “A Message”, that are similar in that they are both slower moving ballads. To add to the situation, I was somewhat distracted in that I had my camera and was looking through the viewfinder for much of the show trying to get some nice shots or video of the performance. Anyway, they played “Message” and then sometime later, they started “Swallowed in the Sea”. For whatever reason, I recognized it as the 2^nd time playing they were playing the same song. Coincidently, lead singer Chris Martin stopped a short way into the song and said “I can’t believe I just did that” and then he said, “Oh well, I guess we’ll just play it again.” In my mind, he was confirming the mistake that I thought they had made in playing the Swallowed in the Sea a second time. Only later, when I discussed it with Kaitlin, did I realize that he opened the song with the second verse and that was the mistake, so he decided to start the song over, not play it a second time. Had we not discussed this, I would have gone to my grave telling people the story about when Coldplay played the same song twice in a concert.

The second example was the more painful one, but as my Dad would say, “pain is just the feeling of experience going in” (to your body). My Dad used to tell a riddle that was and still is a real mind-twister.

     A man is in a prison cell with another man when the he gets a visitor. He chats for a while with the visitor and then the visitor leaves and the cell partner asks the man, who was that that visited you. The man says, “Brothers and sisters I have none, but that man’s father is my father’s son.”

Anyway, we were around the table with family and friends one evening many years ago and my Father tells the riddle. Of course, I “knew” the answer so after no one is able to solve it, I give the answer to the group. My Dad said to me, in front of everyone of course, “Are you sure that that’s the answer?”.  Of course I was sure and of course I committed myself in front of everyone that I was absolutely sure of my answer. Well of course, my Dad explains the riddle and everyone knows that I am dead wrong. It was embarrassing but, it wasn’t my Dad’s intention to embarrass me, I walked into that, very confidently I might add, on my own. 

So, likely as with many of my postings, you’re wondering what’s your point? My point is that sometimes, even when we experience things with our own eyes and ears, we can’t trust what we actually experienced. Also, our memory definitely does play tricks on us, so we can also not be too confident of our own memories, even if we did properly record things correctly in the first place.

While I am a man of conviction, and while I will pursue things with passion and dedication, these two lessons remind me to be open minded to other people’s views and to the fact that I just might be dead wrong when I think I know what I'm talking about. 

As for the answer to the riddle, I’m going to leave that up my fellow readers to discuss, and no Googling the solution please ;-)