There's a corn plant to my left and as I touch one of the long, pointy leaves, my description is "plasticky." Someone else might call it "soft." We're allowed to have differences in opinions and those two are different enough that one would think the two observers couldn't possibly be touching the same thing.
Smell. I remember smelling "sausage" outside somewhere and whoever I was with said they smelled "garbage." Was there a garbage can nearby or did my olfactory senses pick up that I was hungry?
Our sense of taste likewise displays our differences in perceptions. One of my favorite smells is that of laundry detergent, especially when I'm outside passing by a random house and the smell of the scented detergent is wafting around the perimeter of the home. It conjures nostalgia of my mom and Gram hanging freshly washed laundry outside to dry. A friend I was once walking with couldn't even perceive the smell that pleased my nasal sensors as soon as it hit me. Couldn't even smell it! How could they block out something so pleasant.
No two carnivorous appetites of my fellow humans are the same. Occasionally, I'll dip fries into ketchup or eat something barbecued, but those are the extents of my taste for condiments. I'm one of those picky eaters. Don't even sneak that tablespoon of mustard into a recipe and if my BLT comes with mayonnaise, bring me a barf bag. I know people who drool over a lobster tail or AYCE crab legs. I like fried or breaded shrimp and grocery store fish sticks. That's the sum total of seafood I enjoy. No, I will not try your shrimp dip that is different from everyone else's. It all tastes like gross seafood to me. I'm a tea fiend who doesn't like the smell of coffee let alone the taste. I will not like your specially flavored kind that "hardly tastes like coffee." Yes it does.
Hearing is the sense I pay the least attention to and I know this because when I'm checking out at a store, I automatically say, "thank you." The cashier may have thanked me first, but I say it without thinking and I thank them also. Another automatic reply I give is, "you too." That kind of habit proves me a fool when I pay for my groceries after chatting about my upcoming weekend plans with the clerk, and their parting words are something like, "Have fun at your party." Yep. It's automatic. "You too." I wonder if the clerk, who obviously heard me, felt like I wasn't really the pleasant person I pretended to be. Clearly, I was not sincere with my amiability or I would have listened to what they said.
Regarding sight, why can't anyone else see the same image I see in the clouds? Why can I only see an aura as a translucent blur when someone else can not only tell me what color my aura is at that moment, but how far away from my body it extends. I appreciate that there is a difference between fuchsia, magenta and burgundy where all three might be insignificant purple to someone else.
Some fabulous things about perception have come before me, such as: “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” ― W.B. Yeats; “What you see and what you hear depend a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”
― C.S. Lewis; “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.” ― Aldous Huxley
I could go on and on with other thought and sense-provoking examples, but the point has been made. Our perceptions are OUR perceptions, and that's okay.
