Estimates

One's perception of other people is usually always bigger or smaller than those people really are.

Dana Bate
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Hello Ken
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I don't like being underestimated. Who does? It happens frequently to me. There's an old saying "Still waters run deep." I see it often assumed that I don't have the capacity or knowledge to do something simply because I'm thinking about it. One can't see thoughts and sometimes more facets and particles of something come in to occupy my thoughts than it appears to others. My mother used to call me a dreamer because she would see me sitting and appearing to stare aimlessly into space. When I tried to describe what I had been thinking about she would just shake her head. She was by necessity a doer, not a thinker.

Underestimating people usually comes from judging the book by the cover. The ugly runty guy at the back of the classroom may offer the answer to the math problem on the board. But who would ask him? I was once told that I could never play a role that I went on and played somewhere else. Underestimate me and you hurt me.

On the other hand, overestimate me and you may hurt yourself. People who expect things from me that I am really in no position to give can lead to all sorts of problems and bad feelings. While my tendency is to say yes to whatever comes along in my life, sometimes I have to back up and pull my oars in the other direction.

One of my biggest problems is my bad habit of overestimating other people. I tend to give everyone the benefit of whatever doubt I may sense and accept people as being who they say they are or who they present themselves to be. I will sometimes suffer great disappointment and awful pain as a result. Friends I though were really friends, artists who I thought were sincere artists and lovers I thought were constant and faithful have fallen by the way simply by being who they really were and I overlooked the truth. I assumed.

There's another old saying "To assume makes an ass out of u and me." I admit to wearing the asses head on many occasions.

The answer is to not assume one way or the other, to ask the right questions at the appropriate time and withhold judgement and most certainly feelings until the facts are known and a person's values and character are ascertained.

It is most surely not an easy thing in this frothy, surrealistic dream of mortal life to find someone's true value and that person's real place in the cosmic scheme of things. Sometimes we meet someone with whom we have an equal stature in the world but we know for some other reason we will never be friends. So we part respectfully and go on our separate ways.

I value and cherish the friends I have, not because we are the same "type" of person but because we are open to experiencing life from a similar level of character and intelligence. And we gave up evaluating each other long ago.

Dana Bate - The Vagabond
Never give up.
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