Bear with me for a moment as I recount my breakfast moment today….
I was munching on my cereal this morning and bit down on a texture that felt unexpected. I presumed it was an ‘odd’ blueberry. I had momentarily forgotten that I had put my kids left over grapes in my bowl too. What struck me was that despite being familiar with grapes and their texture, my instant belief was that there were only blueberries in my cereal and therefore I had to ‘make’ this a blueberry.
I hope I haven’t lost you already because actually this blew my mind as such an amazingly profound recognition of human understanding.
We define situations entirely based on our own belief.
Here in bold it might not look mind-blowing, in fact it could look quite ‘whatever’. But what I experienced this morning was how unthinkingly I believed it to be a blueberry, how despite being open-minded and a free thinker etc etc, I needed to believe it was a blueberry because that’s all I thought I had in my bowl.
Every day I am becoming more and more aware of the truth behind the adage ‘until you have walked in their shoes’. For me it has taken a backlash of reactions from friends and family to some of my own choices to highlight this to me, so even from the darkness of these times, I am grateful for their judgements. I am grateful because I see that from their position, their place, their beliefs my choices are ‘difficult’ and I also see how loving and compassionate and kind they are and if they walked in my shoes just for a moment, they would ‘get it’. They just don’t know that I am a grape, not a blueberry. If they did, they would accept me as a grape, instead I’m an ‘odd’ blueberry.
This post is surreal, even for me as I write it, but it is an epiphany moment. It’s the relative understanding that every assumption we make upon another is based on thinking they are blueberries, when instead they could be kiwi, lime, pineapple, bread, chocolate, egg…. I’m laughing as I write this, but it really could shift our dynamics if we grasped this concept and ran with it. Imagine every time someone riled you, you were able to pause and recognise they weren’t a match in that moment, they weren’t a blueberry and as such you couldn’t actually be sure that if you weren’t a blueberry too, perhaps you might just behave in the same way. If you were a grape or a tomato, perhaps you would act that way too, say those things, dance that dance and laugh that laugh and it would seem oh so normal and ordinary.
So I am so grateful for my grape mistake which will fruitliy remind me that my beliefs are mine and very valid they are too, but they are not for everyone.