Changing perspective: staying still

We all know what perspective is; it is the vision we get of something depending on where we position ourselves to consider it. But it is so easy to forget how much it affects our daily life and the quality of life itself. To begin with, the perspective from which you observe everything is an individual and subjective perspective. There is no other observer inside your body except you. Even when you put yourself in someone else’s shoes, the perspective you get is still different, because the eyes that perceive depend on your mindset, your experience and your story. When you look at something you are not simply observing, you are simultaneously filtering the reality according to your own benchmarks and, at the same time, interpreting what you record according to your mindset and your inner software. 

A person prone to serenity and self-confidence who is not traumatised by any negative life experience perceives the reality that surrounds her in a completely different way compared to a fearful, insecure and traumatised person. Your personal history is a strong filter that has the power to distort or influence what the eyes collect as objective data. But even within yourself the perspective of the same things keeps changing according to your knowledge, your experience and the phase of your life. You perceive, see, give importance to and value different things depending on who you become. Usually perspective widens and expands as you age and the more you are able to contextualise data and information collected up to that moment of life.

I personally believe that perspective endows our life experiences with richness and uniqueness and allows us to see very different things even when we remaining at the same observation point for years.

How do you gain perspective by standing still? By allowing yourself to grow within yourself. Or, if you prefer a different word, by evolving. I really like the image used by one of my favourite authors: Caroline Myss. Evolving is a bit like imagining being an apartment building with many floors. You always live within those four walls, but the more you learn and grow and experience, the more you feel the need to move higher, and when you move from the ground floor to the upper floors, the vision and perspective you have of what surrounds you changes completely. Those who live in the penthouse know very well that what they see and breathe whilst residing at the same address is very different compared to the tenants on the ground floor. And this vision completely changes the quality of your existence.

An exercise that I like to do lately is to simply look for a different perspective on the things I have always observed in a certain way. It helps me to have understood and accepted that we do not live in a chaotic and casual universe, quite the contrary, we live in a perfectly balanced universe where if we shift the point of equilibrium towards an extreme, we automatically trigger a reaction of equal strength that will tend to recreate the original balance. Proof of this is the planet at this time in our history. We have caused so many imbalances with our life choices that we need reactions of a particular intensity and severity on a natural and biological level to recreate what we have altered. The same thing applies to our bodies: we have accumulated so much stress to generate such invasive and persistent diseases that they require a huge effort to be overcome.

The perspective I had on these things until a while ago was a sense of powerlessness and injustice. But now I realise that I have much more power than I ever imagined; my personal choices count in the micro and in the macro, and cultivating a sense of curiosity instead of judgment, with respect for what happens, allows me to not fall into despair and to see opportunities and solutions where many of us keep seeing only problems.

(Pic Courtesy Unsplash - Chuttersnap)