Tag: Perspective

I got that wrong

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I feel bad now. At the time I was annoyed and I spoke quite harshly to him. But he wasn’t doing what I thought he was doing and he was actually being a bit of a hero.

I can understand my response. It was two in the morning and he had woken me up with his barking. Strike 1.

I could immediately tell that he wasn’t where he should have been. Strike 2.

Plus he didn’t seem to be keen to go back to bed. Strike 3.

I had to physically pick him up and put him back in his pen, making sure he couldn’t get out again.

That was all well and good until a little while later exactly the same thing happened. What is the deal with this dog?

I was not happy and I told him that. In the morning things were a bit icy between us still.

I found out later that our neighbours had four people try to break into their home in the early hours of the morning. Now I think I know what the dog was up to.

I’m not annoyed at him anymore. I’m proud of him.

I’m annoyed at myself for not checking out my surroundings when I was putting him back to bed.

I’m annoyed that I didn’t give the dog the benefit of the doubt. I read the situation very wrong and it has completely changed my perspective of the event. Sorry Jake.

It was a solid reminder to check my perspective of all events that happen, in case there is another explanation for what I am seeing.

The Happy Life

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“Happiness does not lead to gratitude. Gratitude leads to happiness.” Monk David Steindl-Rast

I find happiness to be elusive. One minute I will feel happy, the next minute the coffee I was drinking is finished, or the weather changed, or one of the kids is loud, or the series I was binging has finished.

This sort of happiness seems so fickle because it is entirely dependent upon what is happening to me and my focus is only on what I am consuming. I hate that. I want to be someone that is always happy, no matter what is going on around them.

Bob Dylan said that happy is a ‘yuppie word’. It’s a word that gets used by people who are so fortunate in their life that they have time to think about whether they are happy or not. He went on to say that ‘it’s not happiness or unhappiness, it’s either blessed or unblessed.’

I don’t know what unblessed looks like, but I know that if I have air in my lungs, enough food to eat, a roof over my head and people in my life that love me, then I am blessed – and that makes me happy.

The Generosity of Perspective

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We know that other people see things differently from us. There are many different opinions about food, weather, raising children, pets, politics, movies, clothes, ice cream – everything.

We have no control over someone else’s perspective on life. We are unable to change their perspective, no matter how much we might want to.

What we do have control over is how we respond to their perspective and opinion.

We can do this well by asking one question – where do my own opinions come from?

As we begin to unpack that question and realise that our perspectives and opinions grow out of every single life experience we have ever had, then we can start to understand a little of how someone else can be so different from us. Their life journey has taken them down different paths, they have different values, they see things through different filters.

What is more challenging is when someone we know shares many of the same opinions that we do, except for one or two major issues in life. This can lead to strained relationships because ‘how can someone that is so much like me, think like this?’.

Someone once told me that the best way to approach marriage is to find the most optimistic reason why your spouse does the things that they do. In doing so, you don’t end up creating a mystical, negative narrative about someone you love, and it gives you the opportunity to discover more about them. This philosophy is not just for marriage relationships – it is helpful for all human interaction.

Just because people think or behave (or vote) differently to us, it doesn’t mean that they are evil, it means we don’t understand them yet.

We don’t have to agree with someone’s opinion to understand them.

Bad Development

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People make mistakes. All of us do. It’s a fact of life. How we respond to those mistakes will either allow us to create something great out of them or it will define us.

Many people give their money generously to a vast amount of charities. When people give, they have an expectation that the money will be used wisely to create a positive impact in a certain area of the world.

Sometimes those expectations are not met and the positive impact is not created, in fact it can actually cause a negative result. I have seen this often with international development. When organisations work in developing countries to fight against poverty a program that they implement with the intention of doing good can backfire and create harm. I’ve heard of projects where the experts convinced local farmers to change their crops, so they could grow more of another type of food which would increase their income. In the end the new crop didn’t produce anywhere near what was predicted, so the farmers were left with less than they would have if they didn’t change, and what they did harvest, nobody wanted to purchase because there was no demand.

That is bad development. But it’s not the end of the story. If we allow it, by being open and honest when things don’t work out, bad development can be the stepping stone to good development then great development and then life transformation.

It’s the same in everyday life. A mistake doesn’t have to be fatal, in fact it can be the greatest thing to ever happen because it brings learning and a fresh perspective.