Tiny little window

Sometimes, there are thick walls between us. As our relationships develop, we can perforate those walls to some extent, but they never disappear completely.

So when we have an interaction with someone new, all we have is a tiny little window into that person's world. A peephole in the wall.

And that person has a tiny little window into our world.

When those windows align, the temptation is to make generalizations based on what we can see.

It’s easy to forget that we're only looking through a little window. A tiny little window.

We peer so intensely that we forget that the aperture is on the face of a huge building, most of which we cannot see.

Our imaginations and prior life experiences tend to fill in most of the blanks.

If we’re not careful, we'll start to convince ourselves that we know the floor plan of the entire house because of what we can see through that tiny little window. We’ll assume that, for the most part, the house is much like our own.

And we’d likely be wrong.

When you feel your eyelashes brushing against the pane of that tiny window, remind yourself that there’s a vast interior completely hidden from view.