Hey,
Welcome to your breath.
Welcome to your body.
Welcome to your breath coming into your body as a way of bringing your mind into this moment of now.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Welcome to a hit of hope.
I had the opportunity to go back to my hometown recently.
When I arrived,
I drove to my old house and parked the car.
I walked through some grass to get to a creek that I used to play by and in as a child.
I saw the willow tree that used to cradle me whenever I had a bad day,
Whenever I wanted to daydream as the crawdads and minnows did their thing in the water beneath me.
I touched the willow tree and asked for it to bless me,
A habit of mine,
And I returned to my car.
As I did so,
I looked up and down the street.
To the east was my old high school.
I had to walk there most mornings,
And when it was winter,
My wet hair would often freeze as I did so.
To the west and around the corner was my elementary school,
And again,
I often walked there and back.
Before I stood there now,
If you had asked me how far it was to my high school,
I would have said a mile.
If you had asked me how far it was to my elementary school,
I would have said two miles.
In reality,
My high school was maybe a quarter of a mile from my house,
And my elementary school maybe half a mile at most.
Perspective is everything.
Now I could Google facts about perspective,
But I'd rather consider the emotional truths to this idea,
So my apologies to any architects or 3D artists out there.
It seems to me that perspective requires both an eye,
A physical eye,
That sees and an eye,
A sentient being that is doing the seeing.
And perspective is all about the relationship of these two eyes to what is being seen.
So this means there has to be an eye in the space,
Judging the relationships of things in the space.
It is the eye then who decides high and low,
Thin and wide,
Up and down,
Close and far.
Which leads me to wonder,
Is perspective like that Buddhist koan?
If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one to hear it,
Does it make a sound?
Is there perspective?
Is a mountain tall if there is no eye there to see it?
I don't have an answer to that,
But how this matters for us today is the circular nature of perspective.
Perspective involves a creature's eye that is doing the seeing,
But that creature is also an eye that has a history,
And that history affects the creature's eye that it sees with.
It's confusing,
I know,
But think of it this way.
If you had stood on the street I grew up on,
You would have had a different perspective on it because you would have had no history with it unless you also lived in my hometown.
But regardless,
Each person who stands there would see that street differently.
The history we carry with us influences what and how we see.
If you are able-bodied and you have to walk in a store,
You might see walking across a parking lot as something so easy that you don't even need to pay attention to it.
If you are not able-bodied,
Even the shortest distance can be a marathon.
If you have been sick,
You might be seeing this current pandemic through a particular lens.
If you've always been healthy,
You might see it differently.
If you have money,
You see it one way,
If you do not have money,
You probably see it another way.
And of course,
Our own perspectives can also change with time,
With experience,
With knowledge.
You can bet my current self that stood on my old street was very different than that self that grew up there.
So you might be saying to yourself,
Okay,
Betsy,
But what's the point of all this?
Or were you just in the mood for some philosophical musings?
For me,
This matters because of something else I saw when I went back to my hometown.
I went to the church I grew up in,
And as an adult,
I once again lost myself in the stained glass windows.
Something I remember doing as a child,
Probably when the service was not the most interesting thing to me.
But as I did so,
It occurred to me that perspective is like a stained glass window.
How we see is stained,
If you will,
By the events of our lives.
So our perspective is stained by our histories.
And sometimes it can be helpful to take a step back and realize that and realize someone else might be seeing things because of how their history has stained their lives.
So we can pay attention to what we pay attention to and how we pay attention to it and realize that is influenced by our histories.
We can ask ourselves,
Do I gaze kindly at this for a particular reason?
Do I hate something because of a particular reason?
What is the history that is staining the way I see this?
It's important because then you can make a choice.
Is that really what I want to pay attention to?
Is that really how I want to see this?
And then to be kind because others will be seeing things in their own ways because of their own histories.
Perspective then is all about the relationship between the I and the I that encounters things.
And one I and another I can see the same thing very differently.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Namaste.
