Grain of Salt

Where have I been in my life, anyway? I'm just now learning something I already knew at a superficial level and am now learning at a very deep level: A whole lot of the time we have absolutely no idea what people actually mean by what they say, and they have absolutely no idea what we mean either. I'm having weird experiences where I say something that seems incredibly easy to understand, and what is heard is something not even remotely like what I meant. I am also experiencing troubling examples of not understanding what people mean. All of which makes me remember other examples of misunderstandings in the past that were based on misreading of communication. Several people in my life have told me that they know for a fact what someone meant and what his/her motives were. I listened but disagreed that they knew for a fact...I could think of several other possibilities. So, right now I'm taking everything I hear with a grain of salt and asking a lot of questions about what the person meant. I'm also asking what people think about what I'm saying and getting some interesting result from that. Hmmmm.