Different Points of View

There's a song that goes something like, "there's two sides, to every situation, yes there's two sides, two interpretations, a laugh is a cry, hello means goodbye..." For example, maybe your friend tells you that she has been fired from a long time job and when you hear her story you fume at the unfair treatment she received. Yet, if you were to ask the other person or people involved why your friend was fired, you most surely would get a totally different point of view. Yes, it is okay to give your friend a shoulder to cry on, but what if her version of events isn't the whole truth and you blindly support her? Gossip and hearsay are very dangerous, both to the people who believe it blindly and to the people involved in the story being repeated. There are normally always at least two sides to every situation and often these viewpoints are a dichotomy with the real truth somewhere in the middle. You therefore trust what someone says about another person or situation at your own risk.


People are fallible and people make mistakes and sometimes people aren't even aware of what they themselves might have missed. We all have blind spots. Is it possible your friend sees the world from a skewed lens of perception, through past pains and hurts that have nothing to do with the current situation? I've taken other peoples' sides before, "gone to war" to defend someone as it were, only to find out that the person was keeping key facts from me, sometime intentionally, sometimes unawares. So try to be aware that the first version of an event that you hear might not be the whole truth, but often it is the one we tend to trust, especially when it comes from someone whom we know and we like.