“Wait, so you’ve been asked to speak at a law school?”

“Yeah, pretty funny isn’t it.”

“But don’t they know you hated law school? Why would they want you to speak about it?”

“What are you talking about? I didn’t hate law school.”

“Well it sure seems that way.”

“I’ve never once said that I hated law school.”

“Like I said, it seems that way. Perception is reality.”

I cringe at hearing the phrase, by far my least favorite in the English language. Perception is reality? I beg to differ. Perception is not reality. In fact, I’d say perception is so far from reality that the two exist on opposite poles. Why? Because human beings cannot be trusted to see the truth. Our eyes are so clouded by judgments, preconceived notions and opinions that it’s amazing we can even see walls to avoid walking into them let alone comprehend the intentions of the guy in the adjacent cubicle. Perception is nothing, meaningless, a collection of insecurities, phobias and biases.

The source of the gap between our individual perception and truth is that we trust our past to tell us what the hell is going on around us. That’s on par with moving your entire family into a new age fundamentalist compound in Texas on the overarching list of Incredibly Bad Ideas. Here’s an oversimplified example of what I mean:

That man over there is smiling at me. A man smiled at me once in the past, and I thought it was because he liked me. I then discovered that he was laughing because my fly was open. I was so humiliated and hurt. Therefore men smile at me to mock me. Now this man must be smiling at me to mock me as well.

Pure absurdity, yes. But every one of us does it on a daily basis. Particularly in the corporate world, where all the messiness of human interaction is tightly squeezed and bottled. Things must be clean, efficient in order to run a profitable business. Corporate life has no time for exploration of a person’s true intention, or for cleaning up misunderstandings based on lack of communication. Stay on the surface, everything is the way it appears in ten seconds or less. All the color, vibrance and madness in every one of us, effectively wrung from our bodies like a wet dishcloth.

Arguably, “reality” is just a concept that doesn’t exist because it’s so often unattainable. But we can step outside our own tiny internal universes every once in a while to look around and see what’s really going on. We may never reach that monastic enlightened point of true understanding, but at least we’ll have taken a step away from the asinine notion that what we think we’re looking at every day is what’s really happening.