A great deal of life depends on issues of perspective. Our feelings about people change drastically depending on our expectations and presuppositions. Speaking personally, I have had to deal with a great deal of unnecessary conflict and stress in my own life because I have not always been sufficiently generous to others and where they were coming from, or because I worried when others had nothing but fond feelings toward me. Given that it is so easy to be wrong when it comes to assumptions, it behooves us to be aware of the larger possibilities for error that exist in our communications.

What I find particularly humorous, though, is that we often communicate far more than we really intend to do in our own lives. I know this is very true for me. There is a scene in Northanger Abbey where the protagonist, one Catherine Moreland (whom I have blogged about before) is engaging in rather honest conversation with the sister of the guy she likes and without ever consciously doing so betrays her partiality for him through her expression of concern and her revealing of her interest in him. Being by nature a rather straightforward and guileless person, this tends to be a pretty common issue for me, and I am always gratified when it goes well, because it is a personality trait of mine that has tended to go poorly often.

In life, we only really have control over ourselves. Very often we tell ourselves things that simply are not true, except according to us. We can delude ourselves in both positive and negative ways, but often the most harm occurs when we think poorly of others and assume (wrongly) that they think poorly of us, leading to problems of self-fulfilling prophecies and wasted opportunities for goodwill and support in our endeavors. Given that such wasted opportunities tend to be difficult to regain, we ought to be more careful in throwing away such opportunities without concern or care.

All too often, the world we end up living is a prison constructed by our own thoughts and hands. Once we start digging our caverns and surrounding our hearts with battlements and trenches and barbed wire, it can be hard to humble ourselves to the level where we can see our original errors. Our pride often keeps us from recovering from initial errors, even where others are willing to forgive, and all too often we shoot first and apologize later if we ever apologize at all. It can be a difficult matter to keep our conduct in check, but it is far better than the alternative of facing the fact that our views of others and their motivations may be greatly in error, an error that others simply cannot correct because they cannot enter our minds, nor would we want them to. We therefore ought to take heed to ourselves and make sure not to think evil of others.