I've been thinking about perspective again, how mine contrasts with other people's. It's so easy to take my own experience and point of view and generalize it to the world at large. I do it all the time. Mostly, it works out. I'm a pretty benign person, so if I go around thinking everyone is like me, it doesn't usually cause big problems. But sometimes I am slapped with another person's reality, and I see that I've been living in la-la land again.
For instance, this morning I got up when my alarm went off at 6:15. Whoa, wait a minute there. You all know I'm retired. What in the world??
I meet two still-employed friends to walk at 7:00, about ten minutes from my house. If I didn't do that, I'd get no exercise at all.
So when I emerge, after plenty of Buddy kisses and offers of toys, I find Jill in the kitchen fulminating over political news concerning the NC legislature and their Constitutional Amendment to keep people of our tribe from ---- horror of horrors ---- getting married. For me, it's a little early in the morning to be yanked into indignation, but she's been up longer than I have.
Fundamentally, I'm in agreement. It is a nasty bit of goods they're trying to railroad through, for whatever political gain they think they'll harvest. It's not right and I don't like it. But I'm having trouble getting as "het up" as many of my friends over it, because it won't change my life one way or the other. We already can't get married here. We already got married in Canada, because of that. We're not going to get any more married than we already are, whether this thing flies or not. I'm not taking it personally. They're trying to consolidate a voting block, which is what politicians do. To expect them to do otherwise is like thinking Buddy will never hunt small game again. It's the nature of the beast.
I understand and respect the activist impulse, the need to get out there in the public market place and agitate for justice. Over the past four decades, I've involved myself both at the street level and the legislative level. I know that if it were not for people who are willing to do that very difficult work, progress would not come of its own accord. At least, not the way things are structured now. But I have reached a point in my life that I value my own serenity and until I learn to become intensely involved in public debate without surrendering my essential peace, I will be careful how I engage. I'm no good to anybody if I am enraged.
So what's this got to do with perspective? It's all about how I see my world. I live in the same house with Jill. We have a more intimate connection than I've had with anyone else. We share many beliefs and ideas and we're constantly learning more about each other. But even as closely as we live together, we don't live in the same world. The very same stimulus can, and often does, evoke different responses from us. We each bring an entire lifetime of experiences, beliefs, values, ideas and emotions to every day, every moment, and because of that we do not see the world in the same way.
I go along believing that my own experience, combined with all of the reading I've done, therapy I've had, theorizing I've been exposed to, makes me wise in the ways of people. And to some extent that's true. But that doesn't mean that I can read minds or tell the future. And it doesn't mean I'm right.
An excellent friend today shared a little prayer that she uses and I like the reminder it provides:
"God bless her and change me."
There's wisdom in that for me to use.
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