TOW: What Are You Thinking?

This week is devoted to the one thing all of us struggle with, and all of us fail to understand:  what someone else is thinking.

In life, we play a lot of games--political games, games for fun, and mind games in the case of relationships.  Sometimes it seems as if life is a struggle for power.  But, in reality, life is only a struggle to understand what other people are thinking.

I think one of my least favourite games as a kid or teenager, was the game called mafia, or sometimes, werewolf.  You had to randomly pick someone to be 'the killer' and then everyone else went around the room accusing other people of being a killer.  The mafia, a werewolf, whatever.  The truth is, I know I always wanted to know the truth...what is this person thinking, or what is that person thinking?

Most of us struggle with personal choices not because we don't know what we want, but because we don't know what other people want.  Often, we use 'the norm' as a guide, but we sometimes feel stranded when we don't know how our spouse, friend, or enemy feels.  We want to know, how do you really feel?  What's really the truth that you're hiding?  Can I trust the words you say?  Are you part of the mafia?
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I often find that life for me is a struggle to understand what other people think, not about me, but about themselves. I can easily understand what other people say about me--I simply need to ask.  But understanding another human being's behaviour is complicated, and requires time and energy most of us don't have.  How to interpret body language?  How to know that the words people speak are true?  It's not easy.  I think what most of us hope for is a world in which not only other people can understand us, but that we can understand other people, and the things they want and need.

I don't have an answer yet as to how to conquer our need to understand what other people are thinking.  I think it's a necessary part of life--we want to understand other points of view so that the world can be different, and interesting.  But, the point remains that we would love to be able to crawl into the head of our boss and understand what they really think about us.

But we don't have that ability...so all we can hope for is a little mental security in our choices, in our own heads.


And even sometimes that isn't easy.  What were we thinking?