Yesterday Wild Tiger Tees (a social enterprise of which I am one of the co-founders) went to festival for good in Columbus Ohio.

It is a cool festival about ‘Doing more good’ – all the booths in this festival have a social tinge to it like how Wild Tiger Tees empower youth experiencing homelessness, there were other missions like Passion works that enable less able people to express their creativity, etc.

Everybody comes to these events with their reality.
1. Wild Tiger Tees: We came to test our business model, spread word, get some business and honestly to have a lot of fun. I am very grateful that I love hanging out with our team, so a day with them seemed like a great idea.
2. Police at the event: For them, success means happy people. Nobody is upset or grumbling – then they can enjoy themselves.
3. Beer People: For some, it was an event where they can hang out, drink some beer and have good food – with not much inclination towards the social cause.
4. Aki (Our Dog): It was not the best event because of all the traffic and the noise from the music on stage.
5. New People: And some people were just new to Columbus and were looking to meet like-minded people.

Everybody came to the same event with their reality. It is the same event, but everybody got a different experience. If you asked a few people you will hear different versions of the same event based on their expectations and experience. For the person who is coming to make friends is looking for people he can hang out with, for a person who is genuinely interested in the social mission – he is looking to meet as many social enterprises he can.

Life is no different. We all live on the same planet earth, drink the same water and breath the same air. But, our individual lives are so different. We have different realities and different expectations from life in general. What this means is that we do not have the full picture of the events including life itself. Second, we get what we are looking for, so we miss out on a lot of other things. And our understanding of the events is never complete at any given point in time.

What does this mean for us? Awareness that our reality might not be the only reality. Next time we get into an argument with somebody or do not agree with their point of view – remember we only know our end of the story. It’s like we are all in one big house and everybody has a different view from their room windows, and when we meet for dinner, we are all talking about our room views, which is ok as long as we realize that other people are also thinking the same way about their view. People who have come to our room know what we are talking about, but people who haven’t won’t know much.

Observing things and not labeling them is one way to remain grounded in this reality – that we have different realities.