Perception is not Reality

Many a time the truth is not what we already know or what we like to hear. There are many traditions that we follow blindly. Unless we look at some issues of life without any bias for what they are we cannot under the issue as a whole. We evaluate a person or a circumstance according to our perception.
There is a story that shows how changing our perception can give a completely different picture of the situation: -
A young woman was sitting in the airport waiting for her delayed flight. She went and bought a box of cookies to eat and kept it in her cabin bag. She took her seat in the waiting area. Next to her seat was middle-aged man. After reading her magazine for some time, she reached to her bag and took out the box of cookies and opened it. As soon as she took a cookie from the box, the man next to her also took one.
She was stunned. “What an ill mannered man”, she thought. But because she did not want to create a scene over some cookies, she did not say anything and behaved as if she did not mind.
For every cookie she took from the box, the man also took one. At last they came to the last cookie. Then the man did a very strange thing, he took the cookie, broke the cookie into half and gave her half. “This is the height of inappropriateness”, the woman thought. “Wait till I get back to my friends and tell about this strange man”.
The woman’s flight arrived and she left the man still sitting there. In the flight, when she reached to take a tissue from the bag, she found her box of cookies intact. All the while, she was eating from the man’s box of cookies. All on a sudden all the bad impression she had formed about the man changed into good ones. She was able to see the man with a new light. A change in perception led to a change in opinion.