I want to move on from the idea of gratitude, that I wrote about last time, to discuss the perspective that we view the world from. Being grateful is one perspective of looking at the world. Last time, I argued that there is value in looking at our world through the filter or perspective of gratefulness. We are always looking at our worlds through filters or from a specific perspective, but we may not realize that that is what we are doing.
Let’s start with something everyone has heard before. Is the glass half full or half empty? If there is a glass on a table in front of you, with a twelve ounce capacity, and it has six ounces of water in it, is it half full or half empty? There’s been plenty of other people who have developed arguments as to why it’s better to be optimistic (half full) or why it’s better to be pessimistic (half empty) and I’m not going to redo that here.
There is a third option that some of you may not have heard discussed as much. The glass contains six ounces of water. Stop. End. Period. That is what is in front of you. If we don’t see that the glass contains six ounces of water, because we are seeing it as half full or half empty, then we are applying a filter to what we are seeing. Truly, the glass is half full and half empty at the same time. To pick only one of those descriptions is to apply a value judgement to the glass. This is not an original idea. Here’s a video that I saw a while back explaining this and discussing how we make value judgements about what we encounter and how we can accept what the world offers us.
Let’s take another step forward with this idea of perspective. Imagine a brand new car. Whatever your favorite car is in your favorite color. Now imagine that someone walks up to the driver’s side of the car and smashes it with a sledge hammer a couple of times. If you are looking at the driver’s side of the car, you see the damage. If you are looking at the passenger’s side of the car, you are looking at your brand new favorite car in your favorite color. Maybe if you’re looking at the car from the front or the back you can see the damaged side and the undamaged side.
If you are on the passenger’s side and you are unable or unwilling to see the car from the driver’s side, you may never know that the car is dented. How many things in our lives are like this? We see things the way that we see things and we may have no idea that there’s another way.
I think people are like this too. People are like crystal prisms with many facets. We show one side of ourselves to our parents (maybe not even the same side to both parents), one side of ourselves to our spouse, one side to co-workers, one side to our children, and on and on. So who are we? It depends on who you ask.
How do we ever know what something really looks like if we see things from only one side? We walk around and look at something from multiple positions. We can literally walk around something and look or if it’s an idea, we can make it an intellectual exercise and examine the idea from different points of view. It seems like, in general, we are getting worse at this. American politics has become one side yelling at the other without actually trying to hear what the other side is saying. When people search online for information, they are only searching for more pictures of the side of the car they are already looking at instead of trying to see the view from the other side. Some people do this intentionally and some people probably don’t even realize that’s what they’re doing.
I have become really interested in finding out what things look like from the sides that I’m not seeing. I like hearing about the other sides that other people see. When I was younger, I was an argumentative, know-it-all prick.
< Pause for laughter…some of you that know me are wondering why I put “when I was younger, I used to be” in there, right?>
I just came out into the world as an argumentative contrarian and I didn’t know that’s what I was doing and I didn’t know that I was being an asshole arguing all the time. But it’s like the glass half-full thing, can we accept what the world gives us and make it a little better? Since I started out arguing all the time that just became the way that I am. But I didn’t used to care about what things looked like from the other side. If I wasn’t interested in it, then I didn’t want to learn about it.
But I’ve been able to get past arguing just to argue. Now, I push back on people because I really want to hear about their side of the story. I push back so that I can hear them defend their side of the argument and that way I really get to learn about what they’re seeing over on their side. Now, it makes me super happy if someone changes my mind because it means that they showed me a side that I had not seen before.
And now I like hearing about other peoples’ lives that are different than mine too. Where I used to just be closed off to things that didn’t seem interesting to me or that I couldn’t relate to, now I’m excited to learn about these other experiences and life stories. I’m only ever going to be me, so by hearing about other peoples’ experiences and adventures and struggles, I can live vicariously through them and get a view of all these different aspects of life that I’d never get a peak at if I stayed closed off. It improves my ability to feel empathy and compassion too. It’s hard to feel empathy if we don’t allow ourselves to imagine what it’s like to be the other person. While we can’t truly see through someone else’s eyes, we can try to put aside our biases and imagine someone else’s view of the world.
It’s a big world with a lot of things to see and a lot of ideas to think. We can only see something from one side at a time but that doesn’t mean that there’s only one side to see. Remembering that there are a lot of other sides is a good reality check. Realizing how many other sides might exist is a good ego killer. Really listening and finding out about these other sides isn’t always going to change our minds but it can help us get along. And we can see how wide and wild a world it really is when we hear someone’s story and someone else’s experience.