POV

"If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own." Henry Ford

I've spent a lot of time in the last couple of days thinking. Reliving things that happened, re-hearing things that were said during our mini-family reunion. Processing is what my sweetie calls it. For me it's probably more like a dog chewing on a bone. I've turned bone chewing into an art form.

In an email I received yesterday, one of my sisters wrote: It is really fun to have all of us together, even though each of us has such different points of view.

Maybe because I'm both physically and emotionally exhausted, not to mention also suffering from a severe case of Thanksgiving dinner hangover - still stuffed to the gills -but I reacted to that statement like it was a bad thing. We're sisters. We are fam-i-ly. How can we have different points of view? Why would we have different points of view?

Two days later, I can finally say something obvious like "duh"! Of course we have different points of view, we're different people. Sisters maybe but still individuals. In an effort to understand something as complicated as quantum physics, I started at the beginning. I grabbed an apple. Here's how I figured it out.

If I put an apple in the middle of the dining room table and asked each of my sisters to sit in her age assigned seat (how old does one have to be before she feels cofortable enough to sit in a different chair?) we'd all see the same apple. But we'd be seeing it from different angles. Neither is right or wrong, just different.

In the case of real life situations, throw in the fact that there are sixteen years between oldest and youngest sibling, as well as lots of personality differences. So in reality it isn't a big surprise that we've got different points of view. Again I say, duh.

What I read in-between the email's lines, was more along the lines that we don't trust each other enough to share our points of view. There's not a lot of safety in expressing our individual ideas. Hmmmm, now that's a bone to chew on.

Merry ME