Though a lot of folks I know don't like to hear it, "facts" in and of themselves mean nothing. They just are. I'm talking about real facts now, such as "grass is usually green" or "the Magna Charta was signed in 1215" or "the atomic number of oxygen is 8". None of these really means anything as they stand. I mean, who really cares one way or the other? They must be placed in some kind of context for them to become meaningful.
There are other "facts" which really aren't facts in the true sense of the word, rather they are beliefs or opinions or the like. For example, "the sun rises in the east" is not a fact, it is a metaphor to describe a phenomenon. Due to the earth's rotation, it looks like the sun is rising in the east but in actual fact the earth is simply turning. Or, "a healthy diet is essential for good health". Well, not in all cases. Some people survive and thrive on what might kill others, and enough people eating healthy diets get sick anyway. There's more here that needs to be considered for the statement to reflect an actual fact.
What the preceding examples all have in common is good, old-fashioned, sloppy thinking. We humans can very often make do with being sort of right and sort of on target and sort of in the know. Life is very tolerant like that. Oh sure, there are times and instances when exactitude means the difference between life and death, but in the grand scheme of everyday things, these are really rather rare. In most cases, "almost" is almost always good enough.
Now, given that this is the case, why do we humans demand so much, especially so much of others? And, as a corollary to that, why are most of us bothered, on the other hand, by others demanding so much of us? I wonder about that a lot these days. Could it be that we're only getting back what we are giving out? Could it be that we are (perhaps unknowingly) expecting more of others than we expect of our ourselves? Could it be that we feel shortchanged in our own treatment as human beings that we're trying to even the score? I don't know. Like I said, it's just something that I've been thinking a lot about lately.
When we look in the mirror all we can see is whatever is there to be reflected, no more and certainly no less. Sure, it's reversed from side-to-side, but we can handle that. The mirror has long been used as an effective metaphor for life and all that happens therein, so it can't hurt to stop for a moment and think about whether we may be expecting to see more in the mirror than the mirror has to offer.
The long and short of it is that whatever you happen to be experiencing, and how you feel you are being treated by everyone else is almost certainly merely a reflection of how you are treating others and what they are experiencing as a result. I'm not saying this is how things are, I'm only saying this is how things could be. Perhaps that's something you can reflect upon.
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