Assumptions and presumptions. Tricky stuff.
Here’s an example: You’re going on a first date but at the last minute receive a call canceling — a family emergency has come up. Your date is very sorry … hoping you will be willing to reschedule … it can’t be helped.
In that moment there are a couple of choices.
The path of presumption says that he or she didn’t really want to go out in the first place. The presumption also could mean that you “weren’t worth it.”
Or the alternative path. Suspending the presumption and saying to yourself, “Perhaps this is true. I don’t really know, and I will err on the side of believing this person.” At the same time, you are affirming your worth by displaying a positive sense of self.
When stepping into the world of presuming, the parts of you that are worth knowing, sharing, giving and receiving can get hijacked in so many ways.
Life is so full of variables. We can never know all of what is going on in a situation unless we ask and communicate.
The high road leads to suspending judgment, taking a pause, waiting to hear all sides of a situation.
When my husband’s brother died recently the depth of the grief surfaced slowly and in unexpected ways. It was never completely clear at times why he was behaving in certain ways. He began to obsessively fix things around the house.
We had a long-standing agreement that our bedroom would be off limits for electronic gadgets, a sacred space I requested, a place that wasn’t blinking blue lights in the middle of the night.
Well shortly after his brother’s death I awoke to a blue light blinking on top of the dresser and saw “red” not “blue”! I presumed he had ignored my “one wish”: to keep electronics out of our room. I was hurt.
When we spoke about the situation, I came to realize that his tinkering with gadgets was a way of distracting from the grief that was overwhelming him. He had inadvertently and unintentionally brought some electronic thing into our room — and was totally unaware of its effect on me.
I felt both guilt and sadness for his distress, and made a mental note to become fully aware of the context and circumstances of our situation that week. To ask before presuming. It all made sense.
Later, a friend shared a story that gave me more pause for thought. “You know in ‘Star Wars,’ Luke Skywalker used to tinker with gadgets when he thought he couldn’t save his sister from her death. It was his way of dealing with grief, too, you know.”
I learned an important lesson about assumptions and presumptions — to take the beat, to consider the circumstances, to communicate. So often we can jump to the place of believing that harm is intended when there are mitigating circumstances at the heart of the matter.