Reflection

Have you ever had the experience of being recorded and then hearing your voice played back to you? Every time it happens to me, I'm always surprised by how my voice sounds. The inflections are the same...the pronunciations are the same. But the tone...the timbre. It's always different from the way it sounds in my own head.

The same thing happens with photographs. The way I like in pictures always looks different from the way I look in the mirror.

My musings above were prompted by a Facebook status update of a friend of mine...she wondered if we ever TRULY know other people. And I've come to the conclusion that we really don't.

Because, in the end, we don't really know ourselves. I'm absolutely fascinated by the differences in perception between people. I know how I see myself. I know my own quirks and tendencies. But, at the same time, I have absolutely no idea how those same mannerisms and habits come across to other people.

It's something that I'm always intrigued by. It's part of the reason I fill out the goofy quizzes on Facebook that supposedly give you information about yourself. Admittedly, part of the curiosity comes from a natural self-centeredness that I believe we all feel to varying degrees. But I think the primary source of interest is just the thirst for more knowledge. I want to understand how other people view the world.

If we all observed the same occurrence (a car accident, for example), we'd each have a different story to tell. I mean, there would be some things that would remain relatively constant. However, the smaller details...they vary so widely in instances like that. That difference...that tendency we all have to focus on one thing or another...it's just one of those foibles of the human condition that astounds me. How is it that 20 people can have the same collection of data (car hits another car) and still come up with such variance in the remembering of the occurrence?