“I presume nothing.”
— Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)
 

Assumptions are easy. Correcting them is hard.
 

Most assumptions don’t announce themselves. They look like understanding. We think we know why someone didn’t respond, what a silence meant, or how a look should be taken. We rarely say, I’m assuming. We say, I know.
 

By later life, many of these conclusions feel settled. Experience reinforces them. Repetition confirms them. And yet the misunderstandings that last the longest are rarely dramatic or cruel. They are ordinary. Small. Left alone because they seemed reasonable at the time.
 

This is the territory the third agreement enters: Don’t make assumptions. Not as a demand to doubt everything, but as a refusal to live inside guesses we never tested.
 

Assumptions save time. They spare us asking, clarifying, waiting. They also shape our relationships, our resentments, and the stories we carry about other people—and about ourselves.
 

How Assumptions Take Shape

Most assumptions begin with missing information. A message goes unanswered. A conversation ends too quickly. A change in tone raises questions no one addresses. We don’t pause at the gap. We fill it.
 

Silence is especially persuasive. It invites interpretation. We read it as disinterest, disapproval, avoidance, or judgment—often drawn from our own history rather than anything in front of us. What we don’t know, we supply.
 

Tone works the same way. A brief reply sounds dismissive. A delayed response feels intentional. A flat expression becomes a sign. We treat fragments as conclusions, then react as if those conclusions were confirmed.
 

These assumptions are rarely malicious. They’re practical. They help us move on without waiting, without asking, without risking discomfort. In that sense, assumptions feel efficient. They let us keep going.
 

But efficiency comes at a cost. Once we assume, we stop listening. Once we decide we know what something meant, we stop checking. Small assumptions accumulate into settled stories—stories that may never be corrected because no one thinks to question them.
 

When Our Own Stories Fill the Gaps

Assumptions don’t come from nowhere. They’re shaped by what we bring into a moment—past disappointments, unresolved conflicts, familiar patterns. When information is missing, we reach for what we already know.
 

Or think we know.
 

A delayed response feels personal because we remember being ignored before. A critical tone stings because it echoes an old judgment. A silence unsettles us because it resembles a silence that once mattered. What we assume often says less about the situation in front of us than about the experiences behind us.
 

Over time, this becomes automatic. We stop noticing when our reactions are shaped by memory rather than fact. We respond to people as if they are repeating old patterns, even when they are not. The assumption feels justified because it feels familiar.
 

Later life offers a chance to see this more clearly. With more years behind us, we have more material to project—and more perspective. We can notice when certainty arrives too quickly, when a conclusion carries emotional weight before it carries accuracy.
 

This agreement doesn’t ask us to erase our history. It asks us to notice when it begins to speak louder than the present moment.
 

Why Assumptions Harden With Age

Experience has weight. It teaches us what to watch for and what to avoid. Much of that learning is necessary. But experience can also narrow our field of vision. What once helped us make sense of the world can become a filter we stop questioning.
 

With age, assumptions can feel justified because they’ve worked before. We’ve seen similar situations. We recognize familiar patterns. We tell ourselves we know how this goes. And the question quietly forms: when does experience begin to substitute for curiosity?
 

This doesn’t happen because we grow careless. It happens because we grow efficient. We want fewer misunderstandings, fewer surprises, fewer emotional entanglements. Assumptions promise order. They offer closure without conversation.
 

But they also close off possibility. When we stop asking, we stop learning. When we stop checking, we stop seeing the person in front of us and respond instead to a version shaped by past experience.
 

The third agreement presses here. Not to strip us of the wisdom experience brings, but to remind us that clarity still requires curiosity. Experience can inform understanding. It cannot replace it.
 

Later life doesn’t ask us to abandon what we know. It asks us to hold it more lightly—to remember that familiarity is not the same as truth, and that even now, some things are worth asking about again.
 

What This Agreement Is—and What It Is Not

Don’t make assumptions can sound like a call to perpetual doubt. As if clarity requires suspicion, or wisdom means never trusting what we see. That isn’t what this agreement asks.
 

It does not require us to second-guess every interaction or dismantle the confidence experience has earned. It does not ask us to abandon discernment, intuition, or pattern recognition. Those capacities allow us to move through the world with steadiness.
 

What it does ask is simpler—and more demanding. It asks us to notice when certainty arrives too quickly. When a conclusion feels complete before it has been tested. When familiarity replaces attention.
 

This agreement isn’t about knowing less. It’s about holding what we know with a lighter grip. Allowing room for clarification before conviction. Choosing to ask, or wait, or listen once more instead of closing the matter too soon.
 

For many who have done the inner work, this posture is not new. It’s a return—often to habits formed in harder seasons, when certainty failed and curiosity became necessary. The difference now is not ability, but intention.
 

In this sense, not making assumptions becomes an act of respect. It respects the other person enough to let them speak for themselves. And it respects our own experience enough to know it does not need to rush to judgment to remain valid.
 

Asking Instead of Assuming

At its core, the third agreement isn’t about thinking less. It’s about asking more carefully. Questions keep relationships open in ways assumptions never do.
 

Asking doesn’t always mean interrogating. Often it means waiting a moment longer before deciding we understand. Allowing space for clarification instead of filling every silence. Staying alert to the difference between what we know, what we suspect, and what we’ve simply grown used to believing.
 

Later life offers a particular freedom here. Many of the pressures that once rewarded quick conclusions—status, speed, certainty—begin to loosen. What remains is the possibility of meeting people, situations, even ourselves with more patience. Not because we lack experience, but because we no longer need experience to do all the talking.
 

Not making assumptions doesn’t guarantee harmony. Questions don’t always lead to easy answers. But they do tend to reduce the resentments that form when stories go unchallenged. They interrupt misunderstandings before they harden. They leave room for repair.
 

In that sense, this agreement is not a technique so much as a posture. A willingness to stay present when it would be easier to conclude things. A choice to let meaning emerge rather than be imposed.
 

Miguel Ruiz puts it plainly:
 

“We make assumptions about what others are doing or thinking, take it personally, then blame them and react by sending emotional poison with our word.”
 

Read this way, the third agreement is less about being right and more about staying open. A reminder that clarity grows where curiosity is allowed to keep working—and that even after a lifetime of learning, some of the most important questions are still worth asking.
 

Related spiritual themes: elder wisdom, four agreements, mindfulness in later life, second half of life

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