Our Changing Perception

Saturday night at the local five-hat seafood restaurant and the kitchen is firing on all cylinders. The kitchen doors are continually swinging open as members of the wait staff circulate in to hurriedly pour glasses of ice water and assemble appetizer dishes, only to exit with a heavy tray propped up on one shoulder. Plates are clanging. Serving trays are flying. The cooks are assembling delicious fried seafood on plates as fast as the orders come in. “Need mo’ scallops!” shouts the fry cook. “Dump another bag of fries, we’re runnin’ low!” yells the kitchen supervisor. Curtis, who serves as the grill chef, uses his giant spatula to flip the fillets atop the searing hot surface. The kitchen is hot, loud, and drenched in fluorescent lighting; a stark contrast to the cool, elegant, and dimly lit dining rooms filled with pleasant conversation that sit just behind the thin veil of the busy double doors.

The man operating the dishwasher works behind an ever growing mountain of scattered ceramic, glass, and silver. He separates, clears, rinses, stacks, and then pushes an array of upright plates into the mouth of the oversized dish washing machine. A process that is dutifully repeated every four minutes until closing time.

And then it happens. Catching everyone completely off guard, a bright light flashes and a bolt of heat is thrown throughout the kitchen. “Aaaaaahhhoww!” Curtis screams in unbearable pain. Aprons hanging on the wall are ablaze. Janet, a waitress, grabs her cell phone and hits 911. The dispatcher responds. Janet is hysterical. “Oh my god! Oh my god! We need help. Hurry! There’s a fire and send an ambulance.” She says with her eyes wide and cell phone pressed to her cheek. Everything seems like it’s running in slow motion. Ed, one of the cooks, immediately realizes that the grill has malfunctioned. He kills the power to the grill and cuts the gas supply. Then he grabs the flaming aprons, throws them into a nearby sink, and spins the faucet to splash out the fire.

It is all over; almost as fast as it began. Thanks to Ed’s quick reflexes, the entire incident took less than twenty seconds. The customers in the dining rooms have no idea the incident even took place.

Curtis’ shins are badly burned. When the equipment malfunctioned, the flames were directed just below his knees. The fierce and penetrating flames burned gaping holes in his pants and left his shins raw and bleeding. Curtis’ friend, who happened to be eating in the restaurant at the time, rushes him to the emergency room even before any emergency response units arrive.

Although the incident spawns lots of chatter with the restaurant employees, the grilling, frying, and slinging of dishes resumes and the kitchen returns to its normal chaotic state.

Two Weeks Later.

The wait staff and some of the kitchen crew are sitting in one of the empty dining rooms late at night after a busy shift. Resting the many pairs of exhausted feet, the restaurant employees relax in chairs and spark up a discussion about the incident that happened two weeks prior.

“It sucked.” said Curtis. “I told the restaurant owner that old equipment was a death trap - for months I was telling him that.” He continued on his rant. “I was in the hospital agonizing in pain for two days with my shins bleeding. The whole thing should have been avoided. It figures I was the one to get blasted.”

“Curtis, I’m so sorry that happened to you.” Janet says with an empathetic tone. She paused for a moment as she relived the scene in her mind. “I saw you wince in pain and I hit 911 on my cell. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.” Janet continued. “It was scary. I was completely freaked out. Now, every time I have to go to the back of the kitchen for something I feel like that grill is going to shoot fire at me. I tiptoe up to it and then I run past it.” A few of her friends chuckled. “It’s not funny.” she said in a monotone serious voice. “I had nightmares for a week after that.”

Curtis, wanting to lift the conversation a bit blurts out “Ed is the man!” All eyes in the room shift their focus to Ed who is sitting relaxed halfway across the room outside the circle of conversation. He lifts his head and reveals his face from his baseball cap. “What can I say? I see a fire, I put it out.” Ed replies, without wanting to draw further attention to himself.

That late night conversation revealed how one event can be perceived in so many different ways. To Curtis, it was painful, to Janet it was scary, and to Ed it was ordinary. Each person in the kitchen viewed it differently and was affected differently. But here is the really fascinating thing about perception…

Twenty years later.

Curtis is a surgeon. When you ask him, he recalls the restaurant fire incident very vividly but perceives it differently than he did weeks after the incident: “When I was at the hospital while recovering from the burns, I felt like, in some weird way, the hospital was home for me. I made some new friends who worked there and a couple of months later, I accepted an entry level job at the hospital’s emergency room. I put myself through medical school and kept advancing in the medical field. The fire was painful, yes, but it turned out to be one of the most significant events that ever happened to me – it was the event that triggered my pursuit of a career in the medical field which led to me having the job of my dreams. Without that incident, I’m not sure what I would be doing right now.”

Ed just recently became an emergency medical technician. He is dispatched to car crashes, and other life threatening situations on a daily basis. When asked about what it is like to be in these critical situations each day, Ed says “I just operate without thinking, I just react. I can’t explain it but I know that I’m doing what I was born to do.” Ed worked at that same seafood restaurant another 19 years after that incident. Now that he’s in his new job, he couldn’t be happier. “That kitchen fire was trying to tell me something – that I should be putting out fires everyday - and it took me almost 20 years to listen.” recalls Ed with a hint of regret.

Janet, who still keeps in touch with Curtis, sees clearly that the kitchen fire event that seemed so tragic at the time was actually a blessing. Janet no longer believes that the world is a dangerous place. Over the years, she has come to discover that everything happens for a reason but we don’t always know the reason immediately. After working at the restaurant for a couple more years she went back to college. She is now a mental health counselor and if you ask her about the kitchen fire she says, “At that moment I was so fearful. I didn’t trust the world, I felt I needed control over everything. Now when I look back, the incident was a signal to me that I should dig deeper to question my own fear. It was an opportunity for me to do that.”

People perceive the same event in different ways. But more importantly, we change our own perception of the same event over time. And look how it changes: To Curtis it became an opportunity to change his career path, to Ed it became an opportunity to realize his unique gift, and to Janet it became an opportunity to further question her fear.  The event itself is not important, what’s important is how we view the event and how we allow it to affect our lives.

Think about your most painful life event. Now look at it from a completely different vantage point, almost as if it happened to someone else and you’re telling their story. Is it possible that the most painful thing that ever happened could possibly be the best thing that ever happened? If so, how? What is the event trying to teach? Put a pen to paper, use your imagination and creativity, and write out the story of the rest of your life using the most painful experience as a lesson learned, turning point, or signpost. When you take this approach, you are looking at the events in your life symbolically. If you begin do this with all of your experiences, you’ll no longer label them as “good” or “bad” but assume they are all for your own personal learning, or as an opportunity to pivot your life in a new direction.