Your journey is yours. No one is going to follow you the whole time but you will have a lot of people who stay close. These people, and others, will give you advice based on their experiences and their understandings throughout all of it. It is important to respect the wisdom and perspective of other people but do not let it overshadow your own perspective. These people have been places that you have not and they have had experiences that you have never imagined. Your wisdom and experiences are equally valuable to other people and even more valuable to you. Only you are familiar with the path that you have traveled and what your senses have revealed to you. Sometimes advice is well meaning but it is unfitting for where we are. Do not cast aside wisdom that you do not understand today. Every experience you have had has lessons wrapped inside. They will unfold over the days and years of your life. Some lessons are not realized for years. It is often hard to learn from an experience that we cannot accept, question or are afraid to relive.
Perspective is an interesting thing and it distorts the reality from one person to the next. Two people can look at the exact same event and takeaway very separate and different accounts of what happened and both are accurate.
Look at the picture below. What do you see? Can you read the work at the top of the page? What is in the background? Examine this picture.
Even upon close inspection, this image seems fairly simple. Now, close your eyes. Clear your mind. Look away from the picture. Look again. Do you see anything different?
No?
Well, sometimes we need guidance to gain a new perspective. This is where the advice from other people comes in handy. You clearly see that there is a picture of a fish on a plate, right? What if I told you that this was not a picture of a fish at all and there is no plate. In fact, the word at the top of the page does not say FISH. Do you believe me?
Tilt your head toward your right shoulder. The image looks a little different. It kind of looks like there is something else there. The letters even change. Do you see that?
Look at the image again from a different perspective.
Isn’t that something? She is winking at you now because you just figured it out. Even if you saw it earlier, the transformation of the perception of the image is astounding. You may have seen it but I can guarantee that someone else did not.
Maybe you can have multiple perspectives at the same time. One thing is for sure, nothing ever changes if you always look at it from the same perspective.
The Observations of Jaco 