Perspective

My view. Your view. His view. Her view. Their view. Our view. Given any prompt, event, or occurrence, hundreds of interpretations can and will be taken and the way we perceive what happened will vary. Perspective plays a huge role in how we see the world around us and the people we interact with, giving everything a twist. Almost everything in this world is subjective to a point, and the way we perceive things, from a narrow view to the big picture, completely changes the world's influence on us and our influence on the world.

There are several places in which perspective changes our views: negative or positive view, events and significance, and amount of empathy. For the first, we can consider a crying baby. To most people, this would be largely annoying and placed in a negative light, we might think of telling the mother to keep her child under control. However, what if a women who could not have a child, or one who had several miscarriages were in the same situation; she might be envious of the chance to do this. For the second, we consider the impact of time on our view of the world. In a study conducted on people who had life-changing events, winning the lottery and becoming paralyzed, it was found that both parties experienced the same level of happiness just a month after. Our perspective of triumphs and downfalls becomes dulled after time and we may not view today's decisions as the same tomorrow. For the third, we can relate back to our first example. Our personal experiences puts us in a perspective which allows for a certain amount of empathy.


Here's a short story modeled after one I've read recently.

There is a large construction site with nothing but small base and pile of bricks. Three men are working on the site and are all doing the same task, taking a brick, laying it upon the base and then cementing it on. When asked what they were doing, the three men responded like this: the first man said, "I am laying some bricks"; the second man said, "I am building a wall", the third man smiled and answered, "I am building a cathedral".

Here it is evident that something between the men was different - and that was their respective perspectives. Each man was doing the same thing, but their ability to see the bigger picture changed their attitudes and views.