Tag Archives: perspective

Somewhere in between

I really like this video of Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about how our brain wants to put things in dichotomous bins rather than recognizing that ideas sit on a spectrum.

It reminds me of my post, Ideas on a spectrum, that I wrote back in 2019. In this post i shared a quote…

As I said in My one ‘ism’:

“We want to live, thrive, and love in a pluralistic society. We just need to recognize that in such a society we must be tolerant and accepting of opposing views, unaccepting of hateful and hurtful acts, and smart enough to understand the difference.”

As deGrasse Tyson says, “The world is not gonna change to fit your inability to recognize how it’s actually manifesting.” That seems to be what people think should happen… the world ‘should’ change to fit ‘my beliefs’. What we really need is more tolerance and acceptance. ‘Somewhere in between’ opposing extreme views is where that tolerance can be found. It’s not hard to find, it’s already manifesting… The problem is that the people who most need to see it are blind to it.

Priorities Versus Motivation

“Get your priorities straight.”

That’s a term you’ve probably heard at some point in your life. But more than likely it means, ‘your priorities don’t match mine.’ The thing is, it’s hard for people to all have the same priorities at the same time. Sure sports team members all want to win a game, but a player in a defensive position moving too far forward trying to score could jeopardize giving up a goal.

Even when the goal is the same people in different roles need to have different priorities. It’s easy to project your priorities on other people, much harder to recognize other’s priorities when they don’t match yours. Even when the motivations are the same priorities can be different. At this point, what’s more important, the priorities or the motivation? I think more often than not people look at what they think others prioritize and lose track of what the motivation is for their actions, and that creates unnecessary conflict.

Cavity

I went to the dentist after work yesterday and got a couple small fillings. Two weird things about me and the dentist. First, I often fall asleep on the chair. With my mouth numb, I don’t feel anything, so I relax and I nod off. I work up on the chair twice snort/snoring yesterday because my breathing was a bit off with my mouth wide open.

Secondly, the numbing injection stays with me a long time. My appointment was at 5pm and my cheek and chin were still numb at 9:30. As annoying as this is, aren’t we lucky to have dentists. Imagine what it was like to have a painful bad tooth a couple hundred years ago and your only options were to pull the tooth out or suffer.

My fillings were not needed because I was in pain, but rather my dentist was preventing my teeth from getting to that point. I didn’t have to wait for the hole to reach my root and cause me agony before trying to fix it. Many people equate going to the dentist with pain. For me a trip to the dentist often involves a nap and the comfort in knowing that I would probably have experienced a lot more future pain had I not gone for my cleanings/regular checkups and taken care of my teach before they caused too much grief. Think about that the next time you are in the dentist’s chair.

‘A’ Game

I had a conversation with a colleague in another district yesterday. I was thanking him for suggesting a great book I’m listening to. We talked about the unique nature of our jobs and he said something that hit a chord with me. He said that while he likes his job as an online school principal, and how unique the challenges are, he’s tired of feeling like there are too many things that come at him at once to give his ‘A’ game all the time. He mentioned that it feels like the best he can do is a ‘C’ or a ‘C+’.

He said, “But that’s not how I like to operate. When I was a teacher I had a lot of control about what my day looked like. Sure, I couldn’t bring my ‘A’ game to every single thing I did, but most of my day was determined by me, and I could regularly bring my ‘A’ game. I can’t do that in this job even though I want to.”

I totally get it. It’s like this job is a juggling act and every time you think you can put on a good show, someone adds one more ball to the balls you are juggling. You looked and felt confident juggling 4 balls, and suddenly you are fumbling with a 5th. Just as you feel good about the 5th ball, a 6th is thrown in. You spend more time picking up the balls than you do juggling. A juggler isn’t showing you their ‘A’ game when they are picking balls up off the floor.

My colleague and I both agreed that we like our jobs, and we want to stay where we are, but lamented about our ability to have control over our days… to decide at the start of the day how many balls we were going to juggle that day. I think that’s something every principal feels and understands. We like our jobs, we just wish we could bring our ‘A’ game to it a little more often.

Strong Opinions, Weakly Held

Stanford University professor Paul Saffo is a futurist and future forecaster who coined the phrase, “Strong opinions, weakly held.”

I love this idea. One of the biggest problems today is that too many people have strong opinions that are strongly held. Well, maybe the biggest problem is that too many people have incorrect, unsubstantiated, or uninformed strong opinions that are strongly held. And these poorly formulated strong opinions are exactly the kind of thing that gets magnified on social media… they incite interaction that is more likely to become viral by attracting both opposing views, and the attention of equally like minded, strongly held opinions. Strong opinions, weakly held don’t pull as much social media attention, mainly because these aren’t opinions that people need to shout about online.

The power of strong opinions, weakly held is that ‘strong opinions’ allow you to ‘see’ and be passionate about your perspective, while being ‘loosely held’ allows you to take newly found information and adjust or change your strong opinions.

Case in point: Flat Earthers are the perfect example of strong opinions strongly held. Any evidence given to them doesn’t matter, it’s immediately cast as false or contrived by people conspiring against them. And so no matter the proof given to them, their strong opinion of a flat earth stay unchanged.

Imagine if doctors and scientists held such strong opinions? We’d probably still be blood letting with leaches to treat a fever, and not washing our hands before dealing with open wounds, surgery, and childbirth. Progress comes from being able to let go of conventions and norms that keep us stuck in our current frame of thinking.

Nothing wrong with strong opinions, they are just better off loosely held.

Intelligent life

What if we were it? What if we were the only intelligent life in the universe? Maybe there could be single cell organisms on a planet or a moon somewhere, but nowhere is there octopus, dog, dolphin, or chimpanzee intelligence, much less human intelligence anywhere beyond our tiny blue planet.

There would not be a single beautiful sunrise; Not a single work of art; Not a single note of music beyond our solar system. With no intelligent observer beauty, creativity, and appreciation of sound would not exist. The universe would still exist, but would anything have meaning? Anything?

Whether or not we are the only ones, we are pretty special… we have consciousness, we have thought. We appreciate beautiful things, and we can laugh, love, contemplate, create, feel, and flourish. We can also hate, harm, anger, embarrass, and injure. But that would be silly when you consider that we really might be the only ones. If there is nothing else intelligent out there, then the sum of human appreciation of everything is what gives the universe its meaning.

I like to think that the universe is actually teaming with intelligent life, but I also think we should live an existence as if we are the only ones… and live with meaning as if what we do as a species is all that matters in the universe.

Changing Perspectives

I’m lounging in a hammock under a couple trees:

When I look up, I see the tree that my feet point to:

Although the tree is vertical and I am horizontal, I am cocooned into the hammock and can’t see the ground, so my perspective is that I’m standing and I can just walk along the horizontal tree in front of me. This shifts the entire world 90 degrees. It looks like I can walk the tree plank over the sky. I simply raise my head to see the ground and this perspective just disappears.

In how many ways can we intentionally do this to gain new perspectives on our world?

That person at work or that student at school who you find annoying, what if you knew more about the struggles they face?

That traffic jam slowing you down, what if it was your car that was rear-ended unexpectedly and you were going to have to deal with months of physiotherapy?

That chore you hate doing, what if you found some pleasure in doing it? What if you could also use that time to listen to something interesting while you completed the task?

So many experiences can be more tolerable, interesting, engaging, or enjoyable, simply by changing perspective. The world doesn’t need to shift 90 degrees to achieve this. In fact, the change can be minor, but the experience can be significantly different… Changing our breathing, tilting our head, looking up, listening intently, smiling, seeking rather than settling, questioning rather than accepting. Everything is a matter of perspective, and perspectives are not hard to change, if change is what you seek.

Nothing and Everything

The earth has been around for 4.55 billion years. Homo sapiens for about 200,000 years.

200,000/4,550,000,000 *100= 0.0043956043956

Humans have only been on earth for 0.0044% of the earth’s history. Or if you look at the age of the one universe, 13.78 billion years, humans have only existed for 0.00144% of all time.

For a little more perspective, a single 100 year life is lived for only 0.00000073% of all time. Insignificant. Our lives are not even a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of the universe. Nothing.

Yet for us, it’s everything. It’s all we know. It’s all we have. It’s no wonder people want to believe in an afterlife… why, there simply has to be more… or so the thinking goes. But regardless of your beliefs, this life is unlikely to go past 100 years. Life is so short and fleeting. This begs the questions:

Are you passing time, or are you experiencing it?

Are you completing tasks or creating memories?

Are you treating life like it is nothing, or do you realize that, for you, it is everything?

Doors of perception

We don’t see the world exactly as it is. We see the world through the spectrum of white light, and our eyes fill in the blank spot in our vision that is created by our optic nerve. Other animals can see in the ultraviolet spectrum. We can’t sense an earthquake tremor as quickly as birds. We can’t smell as well as our dogs, we can’t see in the dark as well as our cats. We appreciate different shades of colours that some animals can’t see. In fact, our culture and upbringing affects our appreciation of colours and our ability to distinguish colours from one another.

All this to say that we don’t see the world as it really is. Our senses are so powerful, yet they limit us. And that’s before our biases even creep in. Politics, religion, science, mind altering drugs, diet, confidence, insecurities, mood… so many things alter the way we see the world.

We don’t see the world as it is. We are quite literally delusional. Our perception of the world is one-of-a-kind, uniquely different than everyone else’s. This is useful to remember when we can’t come to a mutual understanding. When we disagree on a perspective, it isn’t just that we don’t see eye to eye, it’s also that we are seeing from different eyes.

Understanding this, we need to be more patient with each other. More open to different views. More appreciative about where others are coming from. Our perception of the world is different than others, and always will be… no matter how wide open we think our perceptual doors are.

We are all blind

The blind men and an elephant

A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called an elephant, had been brought to the town, but none of them were aware of its shape and form. Out of curiosity, they said: “We must inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable”. So, they sought it out, and when they found it they groped about it. The first person, whose hand landed on the trunk, said, “This being is like a thick snake”. For another one whose hand reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. As for another person, whose hand was upon its leg, said, the elephant is a pillar like a tree-trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side said the elephant, “is a wall”. Another who felt its tail, described it as a rope. The last felt its tusk, stating the elephant is that which is hard, smooth and like a spear.

How different is my sight compared to a colour blind or fully blind person?

My wife hears notes one off of perfect pitch, and can name notes played on a piano without a reference note. I have a hard time determining if a note is higher or lower than a reference note. My daughters can hear sounds at frequencies that I can’t, and at decibels lower than I can.

Some people are intuitive about other’s feelings. Some people can feel when it’s going to rain, others can smell rain coming. Still others can list ingredients in a dish simply by smell. Our senses vary considerably, as do our observations of events.

In a way we are all blind, or at least we are limited by our senses. We don’t observe the world objectively. Instead we hold tremendous subjective bias. Our upbringing, our beliefs, our politics, our limited senses obscure the world.

We touch the world like the blind men touch the elephant. Partially, and with tremendous bias.

Try to convince someone that is depressed that they only need to look at life though rose coloured glasses. Convince someone with devout faith that there is no omnipotent God. Convince a conspiracy believing flat earth evangelist that the world is round. Try to convince anyone who sees the world completely differently than you of anything you hold on to steadfastly, when they see the world very differently, and you’ll appreciate how blind we really are.

It’s no wonder that so many people fight over ‘subjective truth’ because they think it’s ‘objective Truth’. Try to convince the tail-holding blind man that an elephant is more like a pillar than like rope. You probably won’t. In his experience, he is not wrong. The pillar and the rope perspectives are both true to the observer.

Our own subjectivity makes it easier to see where others are blind, much harder to see where we ourselves are blind. We are blind to our own blindness.

How different is a life where we touch a single part of an elephant and call that part an elephant compared to a life where we take in all the other perspectives and create a composite view… while being careful not to listen to the blind man standing in elephant dung because his view is simply not as valid. We need to be open to other views, while also being careful of those that throw dung around. Just because we are all blind, doesn’t mean that all of our views are equal.

Copernicus, Newton, Einstein; These men saw more of the elephant than most. They convinced others who could not see like they could see. But in our day-to-day lives we do not meet such people. We don’t discuss such deep topics. We mull around in the dark, sharing small parts of the elephant we are aware of, and believing we see the entire animal. Blind to our own blindness.