Perception vs. Fact

Fact: I'm seriously directionally challenged. North. South. East. West. Yeah, right! Isn't east on your right-hand side, west on your left, north to your front, south to your back? (I know! I know! Don't remind me about sunrise and sunset. It just doesn't work.)

I've only lived in one place where my directional sensibility tended to match fact. In Austin, if I knew where the river and I-35 were, I could orient myself without too much trouble. The directions "felt right".

I've lived in my current house for (more or less) six years. In my mind, south has been out the front door (and, NO! I don't have to be consistent!), north out the back, east has been to the right as I face the door from inside the house (please note prior statement about consistency) and west to the left. It took a great deal of time and many evenings with the sun glaring in my face as it set for me to be cognitively aware that right equals west. It still doesn't "feel right".

I've watched incredible thunderstorms out my back door and wondered how friends were doing in Silsbee and Lumberton, to the north of Beaumont, and then been perplexed when they hadn't the foggiest idea of what I was talking about.

It's only been recently that I've begun to suspect the facts: The back of my house is south, the front of my house is north, right equals west, and left equals east. It does make figuring out the current radar on The Weather Channel a bit more precise.

How'd I begin to make this shift? It happened when weather.com made their "Weather in Motion" app interactive and you could see the weather coming at you based on the neighborhood streets. If you start with the long view where, for example, a storm is coming off from the Gulf of Mexico, and move it in closer and see that it's heading toward your house from Interstate 10 and College, then that makes the storm a phenomenon headed your way from the southwest! AMAZING! Still doesn't "feel right", but it's fact.

I wonder in what other ways I let my perceptions skew the facts. Do I use them to prejudge people and situations? Do I take "fact" and continue to discount it because my "perceptions" contradict them? I certainly hope not, but it's obvious that the potential is there, since north, south, east, and west (and variations thereon) are clearly fact as humanity has established that fact. Sure does open possibilities for reflection, doesn't it?