How do we interpret people's actions…? Everyone has their own way of interpreting the attitude in which the other person performs an action. If we cannot communicate with people and make our point of view clear, people may interpret a gesture of love as a gesture of contempt.

And this topic has come to my mind because I read an account of a person to whom a very special case happened. I don’t know if this case happened in reality or if it is fiction but the certain thing is that it generated in me certain uncertainty.

It happened one day, when this person invited his mother to stay at home for a few days. Her mother is a hard working woman and her daughter thought it would be ideal to invite her to spend a few days with her at her house.

Her daughter, let’s call her Carmen, is an enterprising woman, she has her own office which she goes to every day.

Since Carmen sees very little of her mother and only manages to talk to her on the phone, she decided to invite her to her house, to have her closer to her for a few days, so that she could rest and have time to spend some time with her mother.

She manages to go to the airport to pick up her mother, she receives her, they hug, they tell each other their stories and when night falls they go to sleep.

Arriving in the morning, Carmen prepares some coffee and breakfast, and goes to her mother's room to say goodbye because she has to go to work for a while in the morning. She arrives at the room and sees her mother sleeping peacefully. She closes the door again and leaves a note: see you later, I left breakfast there.

The daughter happily goes to work because she thinks she has given her mother enough rest. Her mother is a woman in her 60s, but she still works hard and deserves a good rest.

When she finishes her work, Carmen decides to go back in search of her mother to share the rest of the day.

When she returns home she finds a note and her mother is no longer there… and instead she leaves these words:

"You think I deserve the contempt you have shown me this morning. Don't I deserve a hug or a kiss from my daughter in the morning before going to work? Or isn't that what I came here for? To give us love…

If you don't have time to give me a hug then we don't have time for anything else. I'm going home.”

This is how a day that started out happy for Carmen because she thought she was making her mother happy by letting her rest. It ended as a sad day that she would never recover from. 

This story got me thinking. We are people who think a lot and speak little and sometimes we don't say what we feel because we think the other person already knows.

We often do things and gestures to please others, but if these gestures are not accompanied with words or with manifestations of our feelings, these people can logically interpret the gesture according to what they understand.

It’s not necessarily what we meant, sometimes gestures do not say what we feel and gestures or words accompanied by explanations of what we want to make clear make the difference in a relationship.

It can be a romantic relationship or a relationship with friends or coworkers. There’s always the doubt of what the other meant, did he or she really mean this? Did he or she mean that?

We will never really know unless we talk about it.

An action or gesture can be taken by others according to their own way of being. They will not exactly understand it in the same way we feel it or the way we have tried to make them think.

In my life I have made this mistake a lot. Time and time again I have done the same thing, I think someone understood what I meant by a gesture and then over time it turns out that I was totally wrong. What I meant at that moment was not understood at all and "misunderstandings" arose, and then it’s too late to renew a friendship or a brotherhood.

I think I made this mistake because I didn't think of it as a mistake. I never thought to ask how they felt about it and let it go.

Each and every single one of us has our own views and understanding, our own logic, on what a specific gesture may mean, so while to us one thing means X based on our logic to others it means Y, since they came to their own conclusion using their own logic. Other people also have another point of view that is logical to think about but very different from our point of view.

This is why there are so many disagreements in any kind of relationship. We take for granted points that seem obvious to us and, if we just listen to the other person involved, in the other person's version, their own interpretation of events, we realize that they suffered because of our behavior. For something we did not say, did not share and took for granted.

There is nothing better than communication in order to understand each other, without communication every gesture or action without explanation can be taken arbitrarily.

Let's take care to speak up and say what we feel to keep our relationships in healthy peace.

I'm @gertu13 from Venezuela.