Filling the gaps

You may recall that Cooke Towers is being refurbished, and that we have being going through all sorts of chaos as the virtual heart has been torn out of our home. We are camping in the Utility Room and cooking on a single ring plus a microwave. It feels pretty basic, but I am also aware that there are many families in Burma and China that would love to have what we have right now.

I think the nadir of the process was the day I came home to holes in the walls and holes in the floor. It just seemed to break some fundamental integrity of the room. Oddly, once these holes were repaired, and the walls replastered, I started feeling better about it all. As you can gather from the picture, we have begun to regain some structure, having put in base and wall units. It is still very much work in progress but now I can fill-in the missing gaps and have some idea what we will be left with.

The human brain is brilliant at doing this and will always try to join up the dots to make sense of our data, and convincing as these hypotheses may be, they only represent guesses. However, we often act on them as if they were truths. We assume motivation, we infer meaning and significance from things that others do and fail to do hardly stopping to consider that we, as mere bit part actors in their dramas may be totally irrelevant to them in that instant.

If you find yourself stewing over an imagined slight, rather than feeling bad, go and talk to them and check your facts and interpretation. 9 times out 10 you will find that you were wrong enough to make this a valuable exercise.

“We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be. And our attitudes and behaviors grow out of these assumptions.” Stephen R. Covey

“Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won’t come in.” Alan Alda

Resources:

1. Previous kitchen blogs here and here

Tags: assumptions, Communication, gaps, kitchen

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 11:46 and is filed under Communication, General, Hints, Tips & Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.