Getting Ready for 2022

I spend the week between Christmas and New Years thinking back on the past year, and forward to the next. Planning, evaluating, giving thanks for my blessings. Thought that it might be good to share a series of these thoughts.

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From time to time, someone will say “you’ve implying X when you say that” usually believing that I’m concealing a negative judgement behind a denotatively neutral statement.

“When you say X you are implying Y.”

My thought patterns are:

1. Is that what I meant? I know my beliefs and values, and so am pretty confident that if I examine a belief pattern, if it is incongruent with my values or my CONSCIOUS awareness, I’ll feel a Stevie Tingle. Something will feel “wrong” and I’ll need to look into that. That has happened countless times in my life. In small ways, it might happen every day. But if no, they are wrong, then there is the possibility that I mean X but my expression, the words I use, mean Y. Like saying the wrong word in a foreign language. You THOUGHT you asked for water, but you actually insulted their sister. Oops.
2. Do the majority of people seem to understand what you meant? In other words, is the insistence that you implied “Y” a minority opinion? Then that would be like using a word that means “water” to most of the people in the town, but you know, there’s this little village up on the mountain, and there that word means that your sister does something odd with yaks.