Perspectives And Realities

i spent a lot more time developing perspectives than most people that actually started when i was about 18 19 years old where i where i discovered that most people have a very hard time thinking through ideas by themselves they find it much easier to be part of a conversation where they have a foil to bounce ideas off of which of course benefits everybody and i certainly engage in that constantly but you also have to be able to be in a conversation with yourself for about two years about every night i would go for a walk for 45 minutes to an hour just thinking and taking a question and trying to think it through and developing this conversation with myself back and forth one of the down sides of doing that is that you could go down a direction that is so flawed without anybody in the room telling you bane you you missed this point because you don't have anybody to challenge your ideas but the exercise the ability of thinking things through and committing that you will only have opinions that you've thought about rather than knee-jerk reactions i think is critical to being an effective community activist or leader it was a night that had had a a terrible rainstorm a very very dramatic rainstorm and i had to delay my walk for about two hours until later into the evening and the rain subsided and i went for my walk and i'm walking down the the alleyway that i was on and and i saw a puddle and there was a street lamp and the street lamp was reflecting in the puddle and i kept on walking and i saw that the reflection was moving i said the reflection is moving that makes no sense to me meaning if if that's where the shining is taking place on that piece of water then how come it's on this piece of water when you're standing here it's either a reflection on the water or not like if i draw a painting on the wall it doesn't move where it is on the wall when i walk away and here this light on the water was moving as i was moving i thought about i said wow i now understand the concept of different perspectives i always thought different perspectives means i'm looking at the building from this angle and you're looking at it from that angle so we're just seeing different things i began to realize no no what we're seeing is different based on where we're standing it's not like we're looking at different parts of the building the building is different just like the water is different here the water is light if i'm standing here and the water is light if i'm standing somewhere else and when we get into community tensions and we begin to think that we're the only ones who are right because the other person is missing the point what we need to realize is it's not that they're looking at it from a different angle they're seeing a different reality and from their reality it may be totally logical if not compelling and we have to learn how to take ourselves out of our position put ourselves in other people's positions evaluate their perspective and then return and decide well was my original perspective valid [Music]