My perception is my reality

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. - Aldous Huxley

(NB: This may run counter to other things I have written over the years, and it probably does, but what can one say? While I strive for consistency, I also recognize that as I get older, the less sure I am about what I know, and more open to an evolution of ideas.)

Over the past couple of weeks, I have had a number of interactions where my perception of a situation was different from what other's perception was. This is not to say my perception was incorrect, thereby my reality, but that the empirical information that I was working from was incomplete (possibly through my own fault, though no interaction exists in a vacuum) and my parsing of available data was flawed because the dataset was incomplete. So, with all these failures/holes in my knowledge and understanding, does this mean that my knowledge was not empirically gained but based on supposition? Is my knowledge of my interactions therefore synthetic a priori?

Why is this a big deal? (Or as someone else has stated: "Get to the point!")

I guess the point is that I have always (often enough to be always) depended on how I see the world to help maintain my clarity of vision, content in the belief that when someone says something, they mean it, and when I witness something, it is free of subtext and therefore the truth. But...

(and that is a huge but. Ginormous. Put white pants on that but and you have a suitable place to show Casablanca)

What if I am wrong?

If I am wrong, I have made decisions based on something (my reality) so flimsy that it becomes an excuse rather than a decision making tool?

Why am I putting this out there? Well, part of it is so that I know that I can admit when I was mistaken, and part of it is to ask if I am alone in making these suppositions about actions and reactions. Would I be a hypocrite if I denied it?

(And, yes...if you are wondering if these are the voices that I hear at three in the morning, this is what they are...or part of it.)

I am looking for answers where none exist and asking questions that cannot be answered.

This is the very definition of futility, is it not?