Hello All! I hope your Monday has been off to a great start? I got to meet up with a few friends that I haven’t seen in a long time but somehow we always seem to continue right where we left off and I absolutely love it! Whats unique about this group is the fact that we all work in different fields, have different backgrounds but we always have a blast E-V-E-R-Y-T-I-M-E 🙂 🙂 After catching up, one of the guys starts talking about his current situation – You know it starts to get deep after a few cocktails (those annoyingly tiny glasses that contain all the calories you require in a day I am making a note to self to schedule an extra 20 minutes at the gym) ha ha!

Perceptions. 

Matt (not his real name) keeps seeing a girl he’s come to be intrigued by at his favorite spot during lunch hour on a regular basis. Now Matt is very particular and isn’t one to compliment ladies that easily so when he says ‘a lady is pretty’, trust me – you can take that to the bank! Anyways, he’s seen her a couple of times but hasn’t really summed up the courage to speak to her. She’s always on the takeout line, never eats in. He said ‘he thought’ she was single because she didn’t wear any rings. She was always well dressed and sometimes made small talk with the cashier. He ‘felt’ she came across as snobby, snooty or proud. He saw her come in on one occasion with a guy. He said they ‘seemed’ pretty close, friendly and talked a lot so he ‘assumed’ the guy might be her boyfriend. At this point in the conversation, it almost sounded like Matt had begun to dislike this girl he hadn’t technically met but was even more intrigued by. He had also built up an entirely new persona of this girl based on his ‘perceptions’ or ‘pointers’ (don’t even know how on earth he measures those yet) and wanted my take and the views of some of the ladies in our group on the issue.

Now, I like to sometimes consider myself to be a holistic individual – not making hasty conclusions or decisions based on lopsided or one sided information. I love to mentally remove myself from a situation and look at it from an outsiders perspective, then put myself in each parties shoes before I make ‘assumptions’ and even then I can’t be 100 percent accurate because I (quite frankly) do not reside in anyone else’s brain besides my own. I feel we (myself included) as people have become lazy in the sense that we are so quick to sum people up, situations and or events based off of a few pointers (we A-L-L have those) – because it saves us the time and discomfort of actually doing the work.

At the end of dinner, we (guys and gals) all agreed that Matt needed to go back to the restaurant and the next time he saw the mystery girl – He should take a deep breath, walk up to her, introduce himself and A-S-K her if she wanted to eat in and maybe get to know her a little bit more – instead of whining to us for half the night (love you Matt!! ha ha) because the bottom line is: In life, you can never quite tell and if you sum up the courage to ask, you might be surprised at what you just might learn!

Feel free to let me know your thoughts and experiences on things you had assumptions or perceptions about  that turned out to be directly opposite to what you imagined. Until I come your way again, ciao for now!!

Periwinkle Starr