Salocin

It's all about the context

"It's a matter of perspective".

I wonder how many different things could have this simple phrase applied to them. How point of view skews our view of the world. Douglas Adams, talking about a completely different topic, once put it like this...

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
~~ Douglas Adams, September 1998.

So when we pass judgement on what is 'normal' and what is 'acceptable', it is perhaps worth remembering that our norms and values are evolved and influenced by a mess of complex interactions ranging from Darwinism to group-think and peer pressure to the manipulations of our political and religious leaders. Nevertheless, however we have reached them, we are fairly coherent as a species over the broad-brush rules of what is acceptable behaviour, even if we occasionally collectively lose the plot, go to war and commit genocide over the details.

Would a different context provide different solutions to the more intractable problems we face? Had Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat been put in space station, in geostationary orbit above their contested patch of dirt, and forced to reflect on the possible solutions to their situation on the ground, would the sight of the sun dawning repeatedly over the edge of the earth, against the backdrop of the heavens, have given them a perspective more conducive to agreement?

Perhaps such a situation would remind such important figures of their potential role in the universe rather than their role in the political and electoral process?

I like to think so.

I'm in the process of relocating from England to France for a new job. Not being in the thick of a daily grind has a similar (if less pronounced) effect. I am staggered to remember the intensity of the anxiety of the most (with hindsight) inconsequential problems, decisions and events. I shudder to think of the influence I allowed certain people and things to have over my state of mind and my happiness, when the narrow and blinkered perspective exaggerated the importance of the most trivial events.

Will it happen again? Probably, I think it is a part of the human condition. Maybe I should learn to meditate.

My current situation allows me the luxury of seeing others suffering from my previous affliction. As the decisions of their next few hours assume disproportionate importance, their world shrinks, the meaninfulness of trivial things is blown out of all proportion and each and every choice feels like a win-or-lose situation in a high-stakes game of survival. I want to tell them how ridiculous this seems, and although they make the noises appropriate to understanding, they cannot see what I see - their reality is different to mine, they have another perspective, and from their point of view, their point of view is the only one that matters.

Language has lots of expressions to describe these things, we understand them intellectually, but remain subject to them emotionally - we'll say "you really need to slow down and smell the roses", or we'll recommend someone take a step back so that they can "see the wood for the trees", but for all our intellectualising, and our ability to point out the fault in others, we remain slaves to it ourselves.

When I did my skydive for charity, I spent the next few weeks looking at the sky and, on occasion, thinking, "I could be falling through that". That helped anchor me to a wider perspective than I would ordinarily have had. But people are different and what worked for me will not work for others (not to mention the fact that many may find the idea of throwing oneself out of a plane a little bit far to go for the sake of a different point of view). Anyway, the effect was temporary and faded over time. I do think, however, that had I taken up skydiving as a sport, it would have been more for the mind-expanding perspective it gave me than for the adrenaline rush of stepping off the aircraft.

Sorry if you were hoping for a conclusion - I was just thinking out loud, or in text, or whatever this counts as, so as they say... "move along, nothing to see here".

Posted by nlvp at May 2, 2007 01:07 PM