Experience And Perspective

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Perspective is the ability to sit back and (more objectively) assess what a particular situation really means for your relationships, your work and your life. And it’s usually a very difficult thing to have when you’re right in the heat of the moment. 

When you’re in the midst of it, things can seem like they’re do or die. Sometimes that may be the case but, more often than not, what’s happening is that we’re not actually processing all inputs effectively (or at all) so as to make an appropriate judgement, just the ones that are the most prominent to us at the time. When that happens, perspective is difficult to come by and we’re likely to have a skewed view of what’s happening (or just happened).

With time, though, with a calmer and cooler head, and with the broader ‘ability to analyze’ that distance usually brings, we begin to incorporate additional variables into our analysis of the situation. And then we’re able to make more thoughtful judgements. (Note that I didn’t say “objective” judgement, just more thoughtful in the context of our world view and our own experiences.) 

Over time, we should get better at this, better at developing and maintaining a strong sense of perspective. Our collective experiences over the years teach us to be a bit less emotional (sometimes) and more considered (hopefully). They (should) teach us that things aren’t better than they seem, but neither are they worse than they seem.  

Experience breeds that sense of perspective, but there’s a catch. 

It does so only if we go in with the view that everything won’t be smooth sailing, because it certainly won’t. We need to go in with the view that the journey is what’s paramount, and that despite our best efforts, things won’t always go as planned. That we will be disappointed by others, and sometimes by ourselves. That we will need to think and rethink the steps we need to take to get us to where we’re trying to go - and even that end state may change. 

And we’ll be better able to accept that if we’re working towards a higher purpose than simply making money. We need to be geared towards a mission, a sense of purpose, that aims to embed some sort of positive change (in whatever sense we believe). We need to be working towards achieving something, which can be as grand as changing the world around us, to simply changing ourselves. 

I’m always reminded of this by something Anthony Bourdain once said. He was talking about travel but it applies as much to anything we take on:

“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”