I had the opportunity to experience how our perception becomes our reality last evening. The interesting thing for us to understand is, our perception may have nothing to do with the facts of what really is.
We took all three of our vehicles to the provincial home school conference yesterday morning to be able to bring the stock we did not sell home at the end of the day. On the way to the conference in the morning, I pulled away from a stop light and my wife who was behind me did not. Her car had stalled and she was able to get it started again and carried on. When she started the car in the late afternoon to go to my mom’s house for dinner before heading home, the engine light on the dash came on. The car ran fine back to my mom’s house.
The decision was made as we were getting ready to head home after dinner, I would drive the car with the engine light on and my daughter would follow with the van. My wife would take the other car and head out on her own and get there ahead of us. That was the agreed upon process and that perception was my reality.
It was getting on towards dusk as we set out. Once out on the highway, I lost sight of my daughter and began to wonder where she had gotten to. Traffic was fairly heavy so I made the assumption she probably got caught behind someone and was not able to pass, so I pulled into the right lane and slowed down, but she still did not catch up. It seemed like no matter what speed I drove there was this car that followed me and with the traffic as it was my daughter was obviously stuck behind it. The longer I went and the longer there was no square lights of a van appearing behind me, the more concerned I became about the whereabouts of my daughter. She did not have a cell phone to check on where she was. Since I was driving the vehicle we were concerned about, I did not want to pull over to the side of the highway in case she drove by me and did not see me.
After more than hour I finally came off the multi-lane highway onto a two lane highway. At this point I am now fighting panic. It is long past dark and there are no square van lights behind me. At the first opportunity where I believed I could be seen at the side of the road I pull over in front of a gas station.. Right behind me is this car and it pulls in behind me. As I climb out of my car, I see two things. One, in the car behind me is my wife. She had chosen a different path from my mom’s and even though she had left before us, by the time we all got to the highway she was behind us. So when she spotted us, she simply pulled in between my daughter and I. The second thing I saw was the van with my daughter, who had pulled into the service station lot beside us because there was not enough room on the shoulder of the road for her to stop. What a sense of relief as my reality shifted in that moment.
My thoughts and perception that my wife was out ahead of us on the way home left no room in my reality to even consider the car behind me might be her. Since it was dark and I could not see the square lights of the van following behind I had not idea where my daughter was. My perception of reality which included all kinds of potential none existent issues certainly coloured a significant portion of my trip home.
It is important to remember your eyes can deceive you and even more so when you have a set concept in your thoughts that may not have anything to do with the facts. How often do we make assumptions about something or someone because of our set concepts and we don’t know what we don’t know? The result being, our perceptions have created a different reality from what the facts actually are.