Same Event. Different Rocks.

Put a Rock in the middle of the trail and invite several Travelers to stand around it.

From above, it may look obvious: one Rock, one event, everybody looking at the same thing.

But nobody is actually standing in the same place.

One Traveler can see a crack running down the side. Another sees the moss. Someone is standing in its shadow. Someone else is looking directly into the sun. One Traveler has been on this trail before. Another has never seen anything like this.

The Rock in the trail may be shared. The experience of standing around it is not.

The event is what happened

We can try to describe an event as concretely as possible:

A meeting happened. A plan changed. Someone said certain words. A relationship ended. A flight was cancelled. News arrived.

Facts matter. Evidence matters. This book is not asking us to turn reality into whatever story feels best.

But after something happens, human beings do more than record facts.

We experience them.

The Rock is what I lived from where I stood

Imagine two people sitting in the same meeting when a major change is announced.

One hears opportunity. They have been hoping something would finally change.

The person beside them hears danger. A previous change cost them something important, and their mind is already racing ahead.

Across the table, someone feels relieved because a decision they have been waiting months for has finally been made.

Another person barely reacts in the room. Three hours later, driving home, the meaning lands.

If they later tell the story, they may all begin with the same sentence:

“We were in the meeting when they announced the change.”

And then they may tell four completely different stories.

That is not necessarily because somebody is lying.

It may be because the announcement was the event—and each person lived it from a different place.

And this is where things can get interesting

Sometimes we know our Rock so well that it becomes difficult to remember we are looking from one side of it.

Our experience can begin to sound inside our own mind like the complete description of what happened:

This is what it meant.

This is why they did it.

This is how everyone must have experienced it.

But notice what happened there.

We moved from telling our story toward telling somebody else's.

Jenny learned this distinction slowly in real life. There were times—especially earlier in her motherhood journey—when she could look at choices another person made and feel quite certain about what she thought of them.

Then life occasionally did something extremely inconvenient.

It put Jenny in a similar place.

And sometimes she made the very choice she had once been so sure she understood from the outside.

After that happened enough times, something became harder to ignore:

Imagining what it must be like to stand where someone else stands is not the same as actually standing there.

That did not give Jenny magical access to everybody else's story. Quite the opposite. It made her less certain that she had it.

She could know her own experience.

She could listen to what another person chose to tell her about theirs.

But there was always a side of the Rock she could not see from where she stood.

Different stories do not make facts optional

This distinction matters enough to protect.

If two people disagree about whether a flight was cancelled, we can check whether the flight was cancelled. If we want to know the words in an email, we can read the email.

Different Rocks do not mean every factual claim is equally supported.

What can differ enormously is what the event was like to live.

The cancelled flight may be an annoyance to one Traveler, the loss of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to another, an unexpected relief to someone who was afraid to go, and the final straw in a week that had already asked too much of someone else.

The flight is still cancelled.

The Rocks are still different.

Your story does not need somebody else's agreement to be your story

This can be especially important when two people shared an experience.

Another person's different Rock does not automatically erase yours.

And your Rock does not automatically tell you what is inside theirs.

That leaves room for a sentence that can be surprisingly difficult:

“That isn't how I experienced it.”

Not:

Your experience is wrong.

Not:

I know what you really meant.

Simply:

This is what it was like from where I stood.

Later in the Sassiverse, the Mirror and the Assumption Mirror will give us much more language for what belongs in our own story and what we may be filling in about somebody else's.

You do not need those books in order to understand this Rock-sized piece:

You do not have to invent their answer.

Actually, that's rather the point. 😂

You can stay with what you know from your side.

And you can leave a little room for the possibility that there is more Rock than any one Traveler can see at once.

Same event. Different Rocks. Different stories. Room for curiosity.