"If you already knew where I was, we wouldn't be lost"
- I was meeting up with some friends in the park today, for social-distanced dancing, and we had some possible mix-ups about where the meet-up spot was to be.
- < insert text exchange here >
- At one point one of my friends said "should we tell her we're by the tents?"
- and I just cracked up.
- The way I later articulated my moment of humor was "If you already knew where I was, we wouldn't be lost"
- and basically what I was realizing was that the nature of our situation was that "tents" was a very ambiguous landmark! It seemed like an obvious landmark—from our position, there was one thing that unambiguously would have been "the tents" but our friend might have been in a completely different area of the park, where they would see something else that would be the obvious referent of "the tents", and neither party would realize this until many minutes later.
- This struck me as deeply relevant to trying to untangle interpersonal knots.