So about a week or so ago it was a bit of a rainy Sunday so I decided to take the 5 and half year old to a drama workshop as I thought he may enjoy it. When I read the description I thought there would be some kind of making of sets involved and my son loves making so I thought it would be perfect for him. I obviously read the description wrong because it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. It turned out I wasn’t the only one because I happened to bump into two sets of friends at the workshop both of whom read it differently as well and expected it to be some kind of performance or something.

It turned out it was an interactive drama workshop where the parents and children had to take part! Needless to say I wasn’t that into it and neither were my friends and I can’t honestly say I did that well at playing along with it and fully participating myself. My son also wasn’t that keen and decided to opt out of some of it. I had also assumed it was going to be an hour and half but it turned out only to be 45 minutes, probably a good thing considering.

When I got home I asked my 5 and a half year old (and yes the half is very important to him so it needs to be stated) what he thought about it. He said he didn’t like drama and was upset because it wasn’t a workshop at all because they didn’t do any ‘work’ ‘ –  which to him meant to ‘make something’ then set up ‘shop ‘and sell it. So he had taken the word very literally then. Tee hee.

When I reflect on this experience I can see that each one of us read the description and saw what we wanted to see and when it didn’t live up to our expectations i.e. ‘what we thought it was’ we were disappointed.

How often do we all do this in our lives without even realising it and how often is everyone else doing it too? People can only see things through the lens of how they see it and no one else has anyone else’s lenses on. Maybe the more we are able to recognise this more compassion we would have for each other and the less we would take things to heart when things don’t go our way or people don’t do what we expect them to do.

If anything I’ve written resonates with you and you are curious to find out more, please get in touch I’d love to hear from you.