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I wonder if you’ve had an experience like this yourself:

I was pulling into a parking spot at my doctor’s office the other day, and as I attempted to apply the brakes, I discovered they weren’t working. My car was continuing to move forward no matter how hard I applied my foot to the pedal.

I really started to panic, afraid I was going to hit something in front of me.

Then, suddenly, I realized that I was not actually doing the moving. The car next to me was backing out just as I was driving in, and the relative motion of our cars to each other — which I was sensing through my driver’s side window — felt exactly as though I was continuing to move forward.

Boy, was that a relief! But it was also very disorienting in an “everything is relative” kind of way.

It made me wonder how many other experiences I might be having in life that feel one way to me and exactly the opposite way to others.

A few days later, I got a kind of answer to that question. My wife and I were traveling to New Jersey for a wedding, and we pulled into a rest stop along the highway for a break.

Just as I was heading out of the restroom, a young woman waltzed into the entrance and started to pass by me. She stopped dead in her tracks, locking eyes with me. I silently mouthed “men’s room,” and she very quickly turned in embarrassment and left.

For a fraction of a second, though, I wondered: Was I in the wrong place, or was she? But this time, having just used the facilities myself, I knew I was right.

For the last year or so, I’ve been watching scientific lectures and programs online, trying to better understand what we know about the universe. While I took a (non-science major) course about relativity in college, I know I never really understood it.

Today, I’m not even sure that the “experts” understand it, since the more we learn about the behavior of matter in the realm of quantum physics, the less sense it all makes. But the fact that many things in life are relative (including our perception of time, as Einstein proved) is undeniable.

You know the old saw: where you stand depends on where you sit. That means we each view reality from our own unique perspective based on our personal history and knowledge base.

As a result, it can be difficult to talk about the same situation or event with others who have a completely different take on things.

That type of relativity seems especially true in politics today. And it’s reinforced by the algorithms that operate social media feeds and online search engines.

They’re designed to show us more of what we’ve already shown a predilection for, which means they confirm our pre-existing biases.

I was taught early in life that keeping an open mind is considered a virtue. But I have also learned from experience that it’s not wise to open your mind so wide that your brains fall out.

There’s an art to living in the real world: We need to filter our experiences through past experiences and our new knowledge through prior knowledge.

But at the same time, we need to think critically about both what we already “know” and what we are learning anew about the world. While we are all prone to jump to conclusions, we need to give new information a fair shake.

Emotions also enter into the picture, of course. We might consider ourselves rational creatures, but in so many situations, it’s our hearts that rule our heads.

Rather than our rational mind directing our behavior, the human brain is facile enough to justify almost any conclusion our heart wants to reach.

I think we should all at least occasionally make an effort to see things from another person’s (possibly very different) perspective.

When we do so, it may briefly feel like our brakes have failed, that we are about to crash, that we are finding ourselves in the “wrong” room.

But such feelings can be educational if they help us grasp, even briefly, just how differently others may see the same things we see.