This is one of those little insights that hits me now and then. Something I expect everyone else will find completely obvious, but had eluded me for the longest time. Ah well, I still feel the need to share.
I don’t think the same way other people do. Maybe there are others who think the way I do; I can’t be sure. But other people think differently. Not better or worse. But different.
The reason this wasn’t obvious for me is that I had misidentified the problem. For so long, I thought my problem relating to others was communication. I thought I didn’t know how to communicate in a way that would get through.
This explains disagreements I’ve had in my personal life and online. I argue with people and get confused when they seem to misunderstand me. I thought I must be doing something wrong in the way I said things.
It turns out, instead, I think differently. I’m nearly sure of it, now. Doing a better job of listening to others, and noting where things go wrong, I’m picking up on it a little more clearly.
I don’t think I could explain how I think differently. And certainly I know that at least some others think like I do (or perhaps the other way around) at least some of the time. Ronni and I, for instance, sometime make the same connections. Probably we’ve had a great deal of influence on one another.
How this might be useful to me is not clear. What it means for my attempts to communicate is trying to pick up on those times that my thought process has diverged wildly from someone else and not try to plow ahead. I don’t know. But it seems important. And I’m trying to do a better job of stopping and noting the important things that occur to me.
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