Different Logic, Different Journeys

By Trish Briggs

Years ago, I took a logic course in college. I enjoyed the class because it appealed strongly to my analytical side. Logic is reasoning based on the principles of validity. It provides a process for determining whether something is true or false. For example, if A is true and B follows A, then B must also be true. Computers are built on these same principles.

Because of that course, I walked away with a quiet assumption. I believed that what was logical to me should also be logical to everyone else. After all, truth was truth.

It was not until years later, while working on my master’s degree, that someone gently challenged that belief. During a conversation, I mentioned that I could not understand another person’s reasoning because it simply was not logical to me.

The person I was speaking with paused and said something that stayed with me.

What is logical to you is not necessarily logical to someone else.

At the time, that idea caught me off guard. Logic had always felt objective and universal to me. But the more I reflected on it, the more I realized how much our experiences shape the way we reason.

How Our Journeys Shape What Feels Logical

Each of us carries a unique collection of life experiences, beliefs, and lessons learned along the way. Those experiences quietly influence how we interpret situations and how we decide what makes sense. Over time, our minds reinforce these beliefs until they become the truths we live by.

When I looked back at my logic course through this new understanding, I could see that the principles themselves were valid. But they existed in a very clean, left-brain world - a world of black and white reasoning where emotion plays no role.

Human life is not lived entirely in that world.

As people, our experiences, emotions, and even our wounds influence the way we think and the conclusions we draw. What feels completely logical to one person may feel confusing or even wrong to another, simply because their life has led them down a different path.

Realizing this brought me a great deal of humility.

When I had once said that someone’s reasoning was not logical, I had not intended to judge them. Yet in that moment, I had unknowingly done exactly that. I was measuring their thinking against the experiences that had shaped my own.

Replacing Judgment With Curiosity

What I see now is that differences in logic are often reflections of differences in life journeys.

When someone explains their reasoning, they are often revealing the experiences and beliefs that shaped it. If we listen closely instead of dismissing it, we may discover something we had not considered before.

We are not computers processing perfect lines of logic. We are human beings learning through experiences, emotions, and relationships. Knowledge may begin with information, but real understanding grows through lived experience.

When we recognize that each person’s logic has been shaped by their own path, it becomes easier to replace judgment with curiosity.

Different logic does not have to divide us.

Sometimes it simply reminds us that no two journeys are exactly the same - and that there is always something we can learn from someone who has walked a road we have never traveled.