Perception

I planted peas Saturday. It was time. Spring insists on advancing every day. It doesn't wait for me to have time to work in the garden. Some years it sneaks right past me and I realize that the days for planting peas have come and gone while I've been worrying about tax tables and tennis tournaments and other aspects of being a household manager and mother.

My daughter had a lead role in last weekend's high school musical. We were within 15 minutes of leaving for Saturday's perfomance when I headed out the door with my seed packets. I quickly made a trough in the dirt, threw in the seeds and tamped the dirt down over them. They were planted.

Later I said something about having planted peas. My husband noted that I hadn't undertaken that task until late in the day. I may have been reading too much into his tone, but what I heard was that a handful of seeds thrown into the garden at the end of the day wasn't much to show for an entire Saturday at home. While he had a point and I can't claim to have used the day as efficiently as I could have, he was also overlooking something: Peas don't grow well in uncultivated soil. I had been out earlier in the day and turned over the soil in the pea bed. Two days earlier I had moved aside the cover that had been protecting the bed from spring rains so that the heavy clay could dry out enough for early planting. I put that cover there a couple of weeks ago. It was covering soil that had been turned in the fall so that less work would be required now. I've also been sorting my seed collection and pulling out those that need to go into the ground in the next couple of weeks.

Sometimes I'm aware of how little other people know of what makes up my days. When I hit a series of stupid mistakes that's nice. As long as I change settings between goof-ups, no one person sees the full scope of my stupidity. It's not so nice when someone looks at the results of my days and decides that I'm not using my time and talents productively. They see how little I've accomplished on tasks that are important to them and fail to notice any progress on tasks that I'm doing for someone else. Or they underestimate how much effort it took to do something. Like planting peas. 10 minutes. That's all it took. Grab a couple of seed packets, walk out to the garden, open up a shallow trench, toss in some seeds, and cover them up with dirt. Not much accomplishment there.

How often do I lack perception when looking at the actions of others. Do I see them as less mistake-prone than I am since I see so few of their mistakes? Do I see them as contributing less to my favorite projects than they oughtta because I overlook the other demands on their lives? Am I most aware of the times they are relaxing and less observant when they're working?

We never have a complete picture even of those with whom we live. If we are so unaware of even their observable actions, how much less do we know the extent of their inner lives? Each of us sees every mistake we ourselves make. We are aware of every contribution we make to the general welfare of those around us. All day, every day, we observe our own actions and monitor our thoughts and motivations. We know how hard we try and how discouraged we are by our failures. In comparison, we are almost completely ignorant of every other person in the world. Yet, we are often tempted to assess the performance and attitudes of those people of whom we know so little. Is there a way to avoid doing so?