The Blind Men and the Elephant

There is an old story, dating back thousands of years, about a group of blind men attempting to understand the concept of an elephant.

The Blind Men and the Elephant

From Wikipedia:

The parable of the blind men and an elephant originated in ancient Indian subcontinent, from where it has widely diffused. It is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before, learn and conceptualize what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their partial experience and their descriptions are in complete disagreement on what an elephant is. In some versions they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to project their partial experiences as the whole truth, ignore other people’s partial experiences, and one should consider that one may be partially right and may have partial information.

I have been thinking about this quite a bit, in the context of something that happened recently in my life.

Many years ago, I dated someone very briefly. The dating part had some geographical challenges that we weren’t able to overcome, but happily we were able to salvage a long term, long distance friendship. For close to 30 years we stayed in touch – by telephone, email, text messaging, etc. Sometimes we spoke several times in a day. Other times, months might pass. We both had life. Got married. Had kids. I moved from Alabama back home to Washington while she stayed in New York. I got married and moved to Georgia. She got married and stayed in NY. I moved back to Washington. She moved to Florida.

Strangely, during all of that time, we only saw each other in person a handful of times. It never mattered, though.

She was my best friend. And I was hers. We talked about everything under the sun – nothing was off limits.

Our friendship ended two years ago. I was completely blindsided. Never saw it coming. I tried desperately to figure out what went wrong. To convince myself (and her) that it was just a misunderstanding. We had gotten through stressful times before. She had voted for Bill Clinton, for Christ’s sake!

I went through the stages of grief without even realizing that I was mourning. Denial – check. Anger – check. Bargaining – oh yeah – check. Depression and Acceptance – check and check. A couple of months ago I found myself lying in a hotel bed somewhere at 3am, crying like a baby. I was sad and upset, and had the thought that I would call my friend to talk about it. And then realized that I couldn’t call my friend.

Ever again.

So I cried.

What I didn’t know

But here’s the thing -the reason I had such a hard time letting go was because I was certain that the problem could be fixed if I could only make her understand.

I was wrong.

What I couldn’t see at that time was that I was ignoring the fact that humans have a tendency to project their partial experiences as the whole truth, ignore other people’s partial experiences, and one should consider that one may be partially right and may have partial information.

What I didn’t see was that she couldn’t see or feel my partial experience (or even know it existed). Or I hers.

I now believe that the unusual nature of our relationship doomed us. In many important ways it was stuck in time way back when we first met. We both grew and changed, but the “state” of our relationship didn’t.

I thought it was something. She thought it was something else. Sadly, we were both wrong.