Standing in a local coffee shop waiting for my order of iced-tea one hot afternoon, I overheard this exchange.
“Excuse me, is this water?” a customer asked, pointing to a squarish, opaque dispenser with a black lever on the counter.
“Yes,” responded the male clerk, “uh … just a question … [not unkindly] what did you think it was?
I piped in, “It does look a bit murky.”
“No, really,” continued the clerk, “what else could it be?”’
The woman and I made eye contact.
She replied nicely, “I suppose it was just a polite way of asking, ‘Can I have some?’ with an assumption that you’d say, ‘Sure, it’s for our customers’ or something like that.”
“Oh,” said the clerk. A light had gone on.
“Isn’t communication great?” I observed aloud. “Had you let things be, you both would have thought the other an idiot!
We all laughed.
We make a lot of assumptions in life about others.
The guy at the office store. I wouldn’t want to be stuck stocking shelves and waiting on customers. What a bore! Come to find out that he’s planning a photographic excursion along the Nile in a few months in anticipation of publishing a travel journal.
Or that older waitress at the diner. What a miserable way to be spending one’s golden years! Then to discover that she’s working to help her granddaughter through college and feels fortunate to have found a job.
Sometimes all it takes to bridge the assumption gap is a question or two of genuine interest. Invariably we’ll recognize that, just like us, others have hopes and dreams. When we first meet them, we may not know where they are on their journey but we do know that they value their lives as much as we do ours.
Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won’t come in. ~Alan Alda
And so, quite simply, we can be renewed in our interactions with others by remembering our shared humanity and by making efforts throughout the day to bridge the assumption gap.
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That is a very good lesson we all need to reflect on. You are quite amazing in your discreet suggestions leading to deeper wisdom. I am impressed and will take this one to heart.
What a great point! It is such a conditioned reflex to make assumptions about others, but to suspend them in favor of genuine curiosity brings far more than the temporary satisfaction with one’s own hypotheses about another person.