Earlier today, Jasmine and I were playing a game called “Wavelength.” It’s a pretty simple game where two or more players take turns guessing how much or how little some clue represents a certain quality. Ok maybe that’s a bit confusing. Here’s an example:

1. Player 1 is given two different words: “disgusting” and “delicious”. These two words are placed on a 10-point scale with 1 being disgusting, and 10 being delicious.
2. Player 1 is randomly assigned the number 7, and so they must come up with a word or phrase called a clue that represents a 7 on this disgusting-delicious scale. For sake of example, they pick “fried rice”—not exactly high-class dining, but still pretty tasty nonetheless.
3. Seeing the clue “fried rice,” player 2 must now guess what the number is. In this case, the closer to 7 that they guess, the more points they earn as a cooperative team.
4. Rinse and repeat with new words and numbers.

As its name suggests, the goal of the game is to be on the same wavelength as your partner so that you can guess the right number.

Now here’s what happened:

I got the phrases “nobody does it” and “everybody does it.” On a 21-point scale, the number I was aiming for was somewhere around 8 or 9. So that meant I had to come up with something that the average person doesn’t do, but is still common enough to dodge the label of being a “rare” activity. After a bit of thinking, I came up with the word “art”—reason being that most people will know a few artists in their personal life, but they’d comprise a minority compared to their non-artist acquaintances. And so I locked in my answer of “art” at around 8 points on this scale.

After a little bit of thinking, Jasmine guessed somewhere around 15—a full third of the spectrum away! Given the difference in our answers, we began justifying our responses, attempting to seek some truth amidst the confusion. Now of course, both of us know that within the realms of our own personal lives, there may be differing truths. Jasmine is much more well-integrated into art communities than I am, and as a result, she encounters much more art than I do on a regular basis. As a result, her definition of “art” is much more broadly-encompassing and, honestly, more well-informed than mine.

For Jasmine, art isn’t only about drawings and paintings. Art finds form in fashion, in music, in storytelling, and in so many other hobbies or professions! Now if you ask me, I totally agree with all of this. In my opinion, art is the exhibition of beauty in pretty much anything. Food, machinery blueprints, maybe even mathematical proofs.

HOWEVER, this is my conscious opinion. It’s an opinion that was demanded by an explicit request to understand my own definition of art, and that opinion may not necessarily correspond to what my subconscious mind understands as art. Before this conversation with Jasmine, my mind would’ve initially jumped to the more “traditionally” understood forms of art: painting on a canvas.

Having reflected on this rather short moment of my life a bit more, I’ve realized that so many misunderstandings and disagreements may stem from a lack of prior cognitive setup. Despite having very similar definitions of art, Jasmine and I perceived the topic very differently before we specifically addressed our own definitions. And this is a relatively innocent example of a disagreement. How many fully blown arguments happened because two parties thought they had different views when they both actually agreed on the same things?

But isn’t this obvious? Haven’t we already been told a billion times that we should seek to understand each other before getting into a fight?

It may not actually be all that obvious. We spend so much time focusing on higher level concepts like a person’s beliefs or values, but rarely do we ever talk about someone’s definitions. While some words do have very simple and explicit definitions, many other words are very abstract and open to interpretation.

And definitions are only one facet of this whole problem. How many other seemingly trivial components of a person’s knowledge and understanding are we forgetting to inquire about?