Bass
On the swampy side of Georgia, foggy days highlight how quickly things decay. In a place like this, whatever doesn’t get regular attention is half-dead before the end of the week. The land claims it quickly. I guess that’s the price for the sheer volume of life bursting across every square inch of soil.
Today is a day like that. I am driving to an appointment for the kiddos when I pull up to a street called Bass. My GPS shouts at me to turn left and I pause, startled, for a breath or two. My shock isn’t due to the loud interruption of my thoughts—with five kids, I’m used to that—but because the word I hear doesn’t match the one I uttered in my head when I saw the sign “Bass St.”
This is the way perception works most times. What we interpret as true is, in fact, correct based on some system or order that has been given to us. In the case of the word bass, we could say that system is language. But some of our understanding is also fed by personal experience or preferences. What do you think of first when you see the word bass?
When we look at the beliefs, behaviors, or body language of other people, we read an even smaller portion of the truth well. Because people are very complicated, most of what we see will be guesswork. So how do we get closer to the truth? If the street name had been Sea Bass or Concert Bass, I probably would have continued on my way without interruption. Why? Context improves interpretation. The only way to gain more context with people, though, is to get curious about what we can’t see. What we don’t know is how they work internally and how it is different from the way we perceive things. To find out, I must ask more intimate questions and realize I need their most honest answers— the ones I don’t already have—to get closer to the truth about the person in front of me.
In case you were wondering, I was thinking about fish. A habit of mine that annoys me greatly is to make a lot of assumptions based on where something is and the kind of people I guess have had a hand in its creation. When I saw the sign in middle Georgia, I was thinking about fish, never mind the fact that Macon is a kitchen for great music. Turns out I was wrong. I’m used to it.