Which way is up?

My son had his last baseball tournament earlier this month and we traveled a bit for it. On the last day of the tournament, I decided to walk from our hotel to the field. It was only a few miles along a pretty coastal path, so it was the perfect opportunity to get a few steps in before a day of sitting in a lawn chair cheering the boys on.

The plan was for my husband and son to drive to the field with all the gear and my daughter and I would walk, find the unlocked car in the parking lot, freshen up, grab our stuff and find our way to the game before 1st pitch. My husband texted me the location of where he’d parked the car and all went according to plan... until we had to find the car. The text read “parked the car right by the entrance, see you soon.”

I read it, thought how perfectly this was all going, and proceeded to enter the VERY full parking lot with a million SUVs and walk right to the entrance of the field and begin to look for our car. And look and look and look. What started out as a nice 2.5-mile morning walk was now closer to 3.5 miles as I literally went up and down every row. I couldn’t call my husband because he was in the middle of warm-ups with the boys and I’d rather not admit to my thoughts that my growing frustrated self was thinking as I saw the minutes tick by and no car in sight. Finally, I reached the VERY LAST ROW of the parking lot and found our car… right by the entrance to the parking lot. And I couldn’t stop laughing. He was right, he parked it right by the entrance… to the parking lot. I was also right, I looked over and over right by the entrance… to the baseball fields.

My daughter who was pretty much over the whole thing by this point couldn’t figure out why in the world I was laughing so hard. I kept saying, both of us were right. She probably still thinks I’m nuts and is very unlikely to ever agree to a nice morning walk with me again.

But the point is, we were both right. What he saw as the entrance was accurate and so was I. Despite the car being lost for a good 30 mins, it was right where it was supposed to be… near an entrance.

I’m almost glad that I wasn’t able to call my husband during the middle of this because I don’t know if I would have been so amused as I paced up and down the rows. I likely would have been pretty annoyed with him for not parking the car near the “entrance” as his text said.

And I think this is how communication goes a lot of the time. We hear what we hear or read what we read and we’re off to the races. We don’t slow down long enough to make sure we have all the information or even the right information. And it often ends pretty badly.

So, I’m actually glad I found it on my own and realized that it was right where he said it was. Because it gave me a whole new perspective to carry with me when it comes to communication.

And this week, I hope you are able to…

Slow down before you jump right into misunderstanding.