Some years ago now I wrote a post in this blog entitled You Don’t Know Me – this is a sort of revisit of that subject, but with a different emphasis. The topic was brought back to mind during my “70 for 70” project contacting ‘old’ friends and colleagues.
Although it is worthwhile going back to the previous post I will summarise it here so as to emphasise the different point of view taken. Back then I was writing about the fact that we interact with people for all sorts of reasons during our life and each of those gets to “know us” to some degree. However, when you begin to delve into it, that knowledge is pretty superficial – and is partial even for those who know us best.
So I got to thinking about just what this meant with regard to the folks that I was ‘re-connecting’ with – what I knew about them and what they knew about me. In Living in Parallel Worlds I outlined a number of different worlds that I myself inhabit or inhabited in the past. Those ideas sort of permeate the other posts on friendship that I have made and are particularly in focus here. The reason for that is that in each of those worlds we meet people – often the overlap between the worlds is minimal – sometimes there are people who share a number of these worlds.
The people that I have been contacting come from many different worlds and even those who inhabit the same world may not know each other as they can be separated in other ways. If I think of my work colleagues for instance there are people that I worked closely with at some point in my forty years who have no knowledge at all of others. The main reason for that is, of course, temporal – those I worked with at the start of my career were different – in most cases – to those I worked with towards the end. A very few spanned (almost) the whole period, but even those were not always in my current “circle” so to speak.
That means, of course, that each of these people will have had different experiences of working with me – but crucially, there is probably no one who is knowledgeable about my whole career.
The same sort of argument can be put forward in other spheres of our lives. Very few, if any, of the people we have come into contact with over the years has knowledge of all the events of our lives – even during the period when we were “in contact”.
I remember some years ago doing a devotional thought at our band rehearsal where I talked about the fact that we didn’t really know what was going on in each other’s lives and therefore we could never be sure whether they were going through a bad patch or not. Although we were all quite ‘close’ to each other we still depended on the other people telling us if something was bothering them or if something had really pleased them. For some people that sort of sharing did not come easily. So we all knew a part of what was going on in the other’s lives, but had no way of telling how much we did not know.
When I was contacting people I came to realise that I was, not entirely subconsciously, perpetuating the gaps. If I contacted someone that I hadn’t spoken to for many years there is no way that I could recount everything that had happened in the meantime – so it was inevitable that they would receive some sort of synopsis. What I realised was that part of the process that then happened was matching what I thought were their “interests” to what I told them about.
For instance, for those that I used to go running with I talked, primarily, about running type matters. Yes there were other things mentioned, but the focus was on how things had affected my fitness generally and ability to go out running specifically. For those that I used to make music with the way my music life had developed was a major topic. For each person there was a highlights reel tailored to what I thought might interest them.
Did I choose the right things – I don’t know. Were there things I didn’t tell them that would have sparked a new connection between us – quite possibly. I guess I will never know. Equally I might well have “turned them off” by talking about stuff they had no interest in.
There is no way that we can ever know everything about anyone else. Nor would that lead to things being “better” on the whole. What does stand out for me is that we must be better at recognising that we do not know everything about the people we are talking to. In order to function we must make assumptions, but we must recognise whether the source of our knowledge is information that has come from the other person or something that we have made up to fill the gaps.
I don’t think that there is an easy answer to this – except the fact that we need to recognise it as an issue. If we meet someone new we do, of course, initially have no knowledge about them at all – so there are a lot of assumptions to be made. We naturally assign people to boxes – which is a dangerous thing to do because although first impressions are often not far from the mark they are also possibly very wrong. This is particularly true when it comes to anything about which we ourselves harbour some sort of prejudice or bad opinion. Popping someone in one of those boxes straight away is wrong – but I dare say we all do it from time to time. Unfortunately for some people not only do they do this as a matter of course, there is then no way for unboxing to happen.
This is, perhaps, most likely to happen when we come into contact with someone only in a very brief way. Perhaps this extends to “celebrities” where we all categorise them in whatever way without actually knowing them at all – since for most celebrities there needs to be some sort of act – a persona – that can be different from the real person. We also categorise people according to who they mix with – guilty by association so to speak.
There is one other thing to be added here before I close off this post – people change. I have got back in contact with people that I hadn’t talked to for many years. My initial assumption seems to have always been that they are “the same person” as when I last knew them. Whilst that might be substantially true, it is also the case that they will have had life experiences, education, disappointments, perhaps tragedies that will impact them and – yes – change them.
For all the reasons that I have given above they may not share any of these changes – they may allow you to think they are “the same person” – or, alternatively, if you are lucky they will indeed share some of the ‘substantial’ events that have reshaped them – and then you must be prepared to be surprised – even shocked – by what you learn and perhaps that new knowledge will change your perceptions of that person – NO – it will definitely change your perceptions – whether for the better or the worse depends.
I am fortunate to have many people that I can call friends – and I realise that there is not one of them that I “know” completely. I think – I hope – that I am sufficiently aware of the limitations of my knowledge of each one. Many of my work colleagues, for instance, I only know their professional persona – it is entirely possible that I would be surprised, shocked, even horrified if I knew about their more private lives. (as an example of that I remember sitting behind someone at a conference and realising that he was composing porn stories on his laptop while listening to the lecture!)
This adds to my litany of posts on friendship – no doubt there will be more to come