(Mis)understanding

Daily Meditation 615– 11/2/2023

Adults generally are not so petty as schoolgirls. Yes, we gossip, but by and large, it is exaggeration and over-humorization that make some (unfortunate) story about us less and less true and more into a “Seinfeld-ized” version of what really happened.

Tell your friend a story.

Nothing too elaborate. Maybe about fishing as a kid. Maybe about your favorite video game and why. Maybe about how you met your spouse or how you came up with the name of your firstborn.

But tell them a story.

Now, have them tell the story to their friend the next day.
Have them retell it, again, to someone else…
Then once more to yet another…

Have that final person come back to you, now, and repeat the story.

Unless your friend and the chain of other recipients are some sort of memory savants, your familiar story is going to be wildly distorted…
It was misunderstood not just once, but many times both in the facts of the story as well as the how it was retold.

And in this case, we laugh and slap those people heartily on the back.

It’s humorous to how how misunderstood it was…Because it was an intentional display.

Now remember back to a time when someone retold some other thing they heard about you.

Maybe it was gossip, but perhaps not.

You probably felt irate about it — how could someone run their mouth about these lies!