Perspective or Understanding?

Understanding

When I looked at the daily post prompt, I thought of 90’s hit song, Understanding, by Xscape, reminiscent of a time I wondered why that boy I had a crush on just didn’t understand me.  To me, understanding is perception.  How we perceive any given situation elicits our individual understandings.  We all, in fact, gain understanding of situations; however, it all depends on our individual perceptions.

Let’s start with an example.  There was a couple who argued for 2 days due to varying perceptions of the same situation.  Let’s call them Max and Diane.  Max and Diane were taking a lovely drive through a small European village.  Diane was driving and came to a stop light.  The light, for some reason would not turn green, and Diane became impatient.  She looked at Max and suggested, “Let’s just run the light.”  Max disagreed.  In fact, he emphatically responded, “Absolutely not!  This is not the U.S.  It is different here!”  Diane rolled her eyes, and watched the line of traffic developing in the rear-view mirror.  The car immediately behind her turned right, and Diane pointed the car out to Max while saying, “See, they don’t want to wait either.”  Max aggressively replied, “They are going somewhere else!”  At that time, they both watched the car do a u-turn and proceed in the direction that they were waiting to go in.  They in fact, had just avoided the red light of eternity!  Max ignored his inaccuracy, and Diane stared at Max with her jaw dropped.  This was yet another occurrence of Max taking the opportunity to shoot her down.  She felt like Max kept his gun drawn at all times to take any and every opportunity to shoot her points of view down.

Diane confronted Max about the situation, and he dodged his colossal error by arguing that he did not know that the person driving the car was avoiding the light because he did not have the same view as Diane.  Max had a different perspective, thus, a different perception.  They had two different understandings.  Unfortunately, this had become a regular occurrence with the couple, and Diane was fed up.  Max and Diane communicated minimally over the next two days due to a minor disagreement.  When Diane finally broke the silence and confronted the situation, the couple engaged in yet another argument.  Diane was exhausted from constantly having to argue points with Max, no matter how important or petty.  On the other hand, Max was confused and irritated that Diane was still upset about a stop light.  Again, they had two different perceptions of the situation, which makes me wonder, is it a question of understanding or perspective?