The thing about perspective is that the slightest shift can lead to the most drastic change.
A pregnant wildebeest unable to run as fast as usual may fear for both her life and her child’s, but the hungry lion’s only concern would be his empty stomach. A woman with high hopes and fantasies of marriage may be completely ecstatic about romance, but the man working as a lawyer with divorce cases would shake his head and disagree with slight pity. An overjoyed student mayhappilyshare about his recently aced test, but the one next to him who did not get a wink of sleep the night before to cram for a paper would probably find him irritating. A singer who practiced many months before a performance and was extremely nervous may miss a note or two from stage fright, but the audience watching from television screens across the globe would comment on her lack of talent. A weak, starving and homeless child may knock on the windows of cars to beg for money or food, but the driver’s thoughts would comprise only the fact that he was late for work, and ignore him.
And Icarus, fell right from the sky with his melted wings of wax may drown in both the water and his thirst for freedom, but the rest of the world would simply carry on as usual. Perspective steers thinking and I wonder about the heights one can reach the moment he attempts to consciously shift his perspective away from its center—himself.As humans, our thoughts are based on how we see things, how we hear, smell, taste, feel; and it is when we push out this centered thinking that we are able to achieve a higher level of consciousness.
Back when we knew little about the world we lived in, people shifted their perspective and struggled to see everything from a higher point of view. This later turned into an art, as maps continuously evolved and people continuously explored the lands in an attempt to draw it all out on paper. It makes me wonder how vast the world must have looked when there was no science to explain it, to be able to ignite a thirst for knowledge that pushed people to see more, to learn more, to create maps that could only vaguely portray their struggle to shape lands that seemed endless.
However, it is in this journey of a shifting perspective that we learn there is a limit to just how far and how high we can see things. Marcel’s take on truth struck me because no matter how hard we search and attempt to climb up for a bird’s eye view, there is one perspective that we cannot attain, and that is God’s. We can never truly know all there is to know, to see as God sees and perhaps this veiled mystery is what keeps people thirsty.
It is through the shifting perspective, just as an artist would look at his model in many different angles before painting or sculpting its replica, that we bring our center out, learn and struggle to learn more by climbing the ladder to a bird’s eye view—a ladder with a top we can never reach but with an ascending journey that inevitably makes us see the world differently.
