Quick Thought #22 – Kate Middleton and Filling in the Blanks

I’m not much of a Royal Family watcher. I’m in the US, so they don’t impact me. I’ve never been interested in palace intrigue, but many people are. I couldn’t help but beware to some degree of the large number of conspiracy theories going around online concerning Kate Middleton, who hadn’t been seen or heard from since an announcement a few months back that she was having abdominal surgery.

They were as hard to avoid as they were to keep up with.

And then, we had her come out and make a video announcement about her cancer diagnosis. Which makes all of the conspiracy theories seem silly and cold in retrospect.

Here’s the thing—our brains were built to fill in missing information, and that’s how we’ve survived for thousands of years. We don’t need to see more than an alligator’s eyes in the water to know danger. We fill in the parts we don’t see. The same happens when we hear a lion or someone yells, “Fire.” We don’t run towards it to thoroughly investigate; we fill in what we don’t know and act.

By the way, this is why it’s important to communicate with your family, your work team, etc. If you leave things out, they’ll try to fill in the blanks with details you have no control over.

Sometimes, however, this instinctive act needs to be overridden by some maturity. The kind of maturity that admits that we don’t know everything and that unless it involves our immediate safety, we also don’t need to act. The maturity to know that not everything in life has an explanation you are entitled to or agree with.

Unfortunately, in the wake of this news, some people have decided to double down on asking why this or that happened if they knew this the whole time. They are still looking for it all to “add up.”

Unrelated to this story, but related to this idea – I saw someone share on social media that they aren’t a conspiracy theorist, but they know when things don’t add up. As if life should always add up to you? Life doesn’t always add up. People don’t always act as you think they should, and things don’t always balance out. Life is unfair. Life is complicated and messy.

People’s reactions to dealing with their father and wife both having cancer and trying to navigate that with three young children may not always make sense. They are dealing with trauma, and that can be very messy. Many of us know that is true in our own lives.

Most of the time, we don’t know what people are dealing with, but even when we do know, they may react to trauma and stress in ways that don’t make sense to us.

That’s life. That’s being human; being mature means accepting and being comfortable with it – not trying to fill in all the blanks yourself.