Point Of View

If you've read most of what I've written here over the course of the years (and if you haven't, you had better have a good excuse!), you know that one of my "soapbox" issues has been that diversity is a good thing - that the one thing that all we human beings have in common is that we are all different. So, it came as something of a shock to me when I realized that all these different people had different perspectives on the world.

I've known on an intellectual level that different people all had to have different ways of looking at the world, but that was knowledge from the neck up – strictly logical, but detached. It was rather like knowing that people shorter than me couldn't see everything on the top shelf that I could. It hadn't sunk in emotionally for me until recently. There wasn't any one singular event that led to an "Ah-ha!" moment for me. It simply occurred to me while reading an op-ed article in the newspaper that the point of view being presented was just at valid as mine … or anyone else's. The knowledge became neck- down – I felt it now.

So, what difference did it make? Nothing overt, but I've come to see myself adopting a more positive attitude about my life in general. That could be due in some way to the fact that I really can feel that regardless of how bad my life may seem, from someone else's perspective it's pretty good. Is there a lot of clutter in my life? To a lot of people, that's only an indication that I've got enough stuff in my life to generate clutter. Am I angry with my spouse or my son today? The fact that both of them are there to be angry at and that both of them will be there with me tomorrow is a very good thing.

I also see myself adopting a broader point of view for myself nowadays. Since another of my hot buttons has been inclusion, it only makes sense to see things from the perspective of others in order to better understand how they feel. That is happening in an almost unconscious way for me. That broader perspective was made evident just the other day when it occurred to me that I no longer saw my life as the life of a transgendered person. Instead, my life has simply become … my life. Yes, I am transgendered and there are aspects of my life that revolve around that, but it is not my definition of my self, any more than being a parent defines me. I'm simply a person with a different point of view.