WHATCHATHINKIN'

How many times in your life have you been in a conversation with spouse/family/friend when the thoughts in your head and the words coming out of your mouth don’t exactly match. Or, better yet, the words coming from the other person travel through your ear canal and get converted to anything but what was meant. Some may categorize this as miscommunication. I think of it as misperceptions. As email and texting developed and grew to their present status of communication giant, more and more messages have been misinterpreted. When you are typing an email or texting – either with fingers or voice – you have in your head the tone you think the words convey. As with the game of telephone, once those letters and symbols leave your computer or mobile device and travel through the world wide internet web (or InterWebbie, as I call it), they may get caught up in a ‘transporter accident’ and arrive to the recipient with a completely different tone and meaning. Without eye contact, voice intonation and facial expressions to help relay what you are ‘saying’, a simple sentence may be enough to start a war or end a friendship. Those of us who spend any time on social media have undoubtedly been involved in tete-a-tetes (well, not really, as there are certainly more than two people involved) that start with a good-natured amusement which escalates to name-calling and unfriending, perhaps even the dreaded ‘Facebook Jail.’ All this due to misperceptions. Brian and I have very different ways of looking at things – me being a visual person, needing to draw out plans, while Brian is able to see things in his mind with descriptions. When we are trying to do a project together and one is offering a helping hand, the other may see it as getting in the way. It works both ways, and invariably one or the other will walk off a bit tiffed and the one remaining will finish the project the way they perceived it, which usually comes out brilliantly. Misperceptions. We just spend two exceptional days at Virginia International Raceway with Reg and Gigi Pridmore and the crew of CLASS. I believe that we have been attending CLASS, on and off, since 1993 and every year, especially since we’ve been heading to Virginia, I feel like I become a much better rider for it. Having gone to this particular track so often, you get to know the turns, the lines and the way you believe it should be ridden. Slippery Pete, one of the very fine instructors, gave an ‘assignment’ during one classroom session – to pick one particular turn or way of riding that you feel needs more attention and ‘make that your huckleberry.’ I thought that I had a pretty good handle on the lines of the turns and I wasn’t there to go fast but to improve my smoothness. I DID know that I needed to work on my body positioning. So the next session I went out with that in my head. I felt like I was really moving my upper body into the turns, getting my elbows out and weighting my pegs to get the most out of those turns. I came into pit lane feeling pretty good about myself. After the next classroom session, Clark, another of the instructors, took me aside. He had followed me once or twice around the track and complimented me on my lines and said I was going very well BUT…… ‘Did you ever think about moving your body on the bike?’ HUH?! I said I thought I was leaning into the turns pretty well and he said ‘not so much.’ He suggested taking a piece of tape and putting it in the middle of the fairing so I could see if I was actually moving from side to side. And I thought I was just about ready to touch my knee…… Misperceptions. I would imagine the best example of misperception is judging a book by its cover; for instance, say you are on a ride and stop at a convenient general store. You are sitting on the porch, sipping a cold drink and relaxing, when a couple of ADV bikes pull into the lot, covered in mud. The two riders dismount, take a pull from their water bottles and look over at you and your motorcycle, which is far from being mud-covered or something that you’d want to ride on the BDR, but they ask, ‘Hey, did you just come through that water crossing?’ When you answer in the negative, they turn away, almost dismissively. Once a real conversation is started, you find out that there is more in common with your riding than thought and you part ways, having exchanged cards, with much different ideas than when the helmets first came off. Be careful of your words, verbal or written, as they have meaning and if misperceived, may cause hurt unnecessarily.