Viewpoints
Viewpoints are funny. Everybody’s got one.
Ha, what am I saying? One? How about one for when you’re happy and one for when you’re sad? A view for boarding and for work, for fathering and for Dad? You got a viewpoint for hard times and a viewpoint of joy, one for girls and one for boys. We see things from that partial place that changes when we change our face. Like I said, viewpoints are funny.
I’m starting to wonder about them.
I am, by inclination, nature, upbringing, and astrological sign, prone to seeing things (as well as one can in such a case, excepting the obligatory valid viewpoints to which I am stone blind) from other people’s point of view. I think in astro-terms my group is called “chameleon-like”. We’re the kind of people who walk in the other person’s moccasins so long we wear them out. Pretty handy on the compassion front, being able to feel Bill Clinton’s pain and all, but wearisome, viewpointwise.
I’ve understood so many different viewpoints that I’m beginning to get suspicious. Something doesn’t add up. How come there’s so many? And how come they’re all right (in their own way)? Maybe viewpoints don’t mean dog squat.
It was then that I realized nothing is true. None of it was true.
That’s a paraphrase from Byron Katie, that spiritual something that something’s the something when she somethings something Oprah. As you may be able to tell, I think she’s quite something.
Nothing is true.
Is that true?
LWIII
I hear your or view you. I can usually see someone else’s viewpoint while holding my own disparate point of view and understand why that person believes what they believe and what makes their belief valid.
One of the few things I’m absolutely sure about is that none of us holds the universal answer. We all come to any moment in time through different sets of genetics and experience and so we’ll often see the same events in very different ways and come away with different understandings.
Each of us needs to find the answers that work for us and to that end we need to create out own viewpoints of the world around us.
Right on, Steve, thanks!