My Perspective on Our Perspective

Ever wondered what has been one of the most complicated concepts in our lives. I think we all, no matter whether uneducated or intellectual, ask one question to ourselves every now and then. The format and the tone of the question might vary in different instances of occurrence. The question basically is why I am supposed to live the very next day. What for should I gather my energy in this long night, do I explicitly choose to live each new day as it comes? Some of the instances when these questions arise might come as the results of negative vibes while the others as the results of positive-thinking and future-planning. Nevertheless, many of us do not even bother answering these questions. I always feel that living this life is very tough (though the other choice is even tougher) and most of the time we keep adding some more of the tough elements in this.

Attitude towards life, towards ourselves, towards people we interact on daily basis or occasionally and actually responding to other’s attitude build our very perspective in life. We keep talking about the concept behind the half filled glass. It is our own perspective which distinguishes people who see the glass as half filled from the people who find it half empty. On top of that, it is nothing else but our own perspective which distinguishes certain people who say “calling the glass half filled or half empty depends on whether the glass is getting filled or getting emptied”. Though there can be many more variants of the way people see the glass, the idea is that if you can imagine the world as a single entity and yourself as another then it is your perspective which draws the separating line.

Now look at the following picture and try to make something out of it. Take your time to do so and you will come closer to know more about your true perspective which is mostly not the one you show in some debate, argument or in any conversation for that matter (please note that exception are always there, if you disagree with the last line then u might be one exception in this aspect). So here is the picture



Now you must have got some idea about the specialty of the picture. Ever wondered if a shadow can be more distinguishable than the real object! This picture is a good example here I guess. Now to understand that the small white objects are the camels and the big black objects are their shadows. This picture underlies a very important concept that the whole world and everything in this world is relative. Shadows which seems more like the camels here is because of the relative positioning of the cameraperson and the angle of the sun-rays.

More or less we all agree that perspective makes or breaks our destiny. Nevertheless, it should not be shocking to know that it is us who make our own perspective. This implies we all make our own destiny. I am not trying to prove anything logically here, but the idea is to reiterate what great thought leaders said decades and centuries ago that “Manushya apne bhagya ka vidhata swayam hota hai” (Man makes his own destiny).

But I do agree to the fact that there are lots of factors which affect your perspective of life apart from your own thought process. One’s perspective is built over the time while one lives his life interacting with different types of people, performing different kinds of tasks and observing different outcomes of the former two. There are basically two ways to interact with this world. First is by Reacting to the things happening around us. The second is by Responding to the happenings in the world around us. There are other ways too apart from these two, like not reacting to things around you or being too indulged in your own world to see these happenings. I will skip these types of philosophy to life and will concentrate on the former two: Reacting and Responding.

There is a very important distinction between these two and it is this very distinction which makes the distinguishable perspectives of ours. Some people are more inclined to react to the happenings around them, while the others like to respond to these happenings. When you respond to a situation, it most of the times becomes a multi step process. In order to respond to a situation you need to understand the situation first of all. Then you need to don someone else’s shoes to see how much of your understanding is specific and how much is generic. Being in someone else’s shoes either validates or invalidates your understanding of the situation, which in turn broadens your understanding and shapes up your perspective.

The other thing is that when we react to a situation we feel forced (either internally or externally) to react, and a forced action hardly underlines the stability and equilibrium of a system. That way by reacting to situations in one’s life, one builds up a not so stable framework of understanding and perspective in one’s life. While on the other hand, responding to a situation carries more depth in the sense that the situation is understood first and then it is put to validating process of one’s perspective before taking on the situation in response.

Even though there are still some ends which need to be tied up in this blog, but to conclude “It requires conscious efforts towards building one’s perspective and consistently refining it”