Don’t they look like

Those of you who regularly read my blog will know that I am lucky enough to have two grandchildren. They are the lights of my life, (not to detract from those others who are also very important to me). It is amazing watching them grow into their own characters, learning about all the wondrous things in life and picking up life’s essential skills.

Whenever I see them they remind me of other people. Of course they look like their parents and at different times they can look more like one than the other.

Others see things differently however. I think my granddaughter looks like my other daughter, as well as her mother. My sister in law thinks she looks like her father (the granddaughter’s, not hers) while she thinks my grandson looks like my wife. My sister in law however thinks that he looks like me. God help him!

This strikes me as odd. We’re all looking at the same people yet we are all seeing different things. I suspect that we all look for different aspects in the same face. Perhaps one of us catches something around the eyes, another the slant of the mouth, another the rise of the forehead. Who can tell?

If this is true of faces of people that we spend a lot of time with, can this also be true of other things we view? Could it be that even when two or more people are looking at the same thing they are, in fact, seeing something different.

I have often thought about the different opinions that people form. We all like different foods to eat, different books to read and different activities to fill our time. We also interpret news and information very differently. You don’t have to spend a long time on social media to realise that is true.

Perhaps though the truth is that we really are seeing different things. One person’s black is another’s white, one person’s meat is another’s poison, one person’s apple is another’s pear.

If this is true, it would make sense of a whole lot of things