Growing Your Perspective 2: Discovering the Universe

As I said in last week’s post, when we arrive here, our perspective only allows for “I’m the center of the universe” thinking.

As we grow and experience new things in life–discover the universe so to speak–our perspective begins to change.

My father was a member of The St. Vincent de Paul Society at our church. SVdP is a service organization that helps people in need within the surrounding community–and sometimes beyond.

I remember my father taking me one Sunday afternoon to a place called Wendy when I was probably five or six. It was a sort of nursing home for indigent, elderly people.

The place was huge–or at least it seemed so to me–and it smelled of urine and sickness, and festering disease.

There were men and women in wheelchairs lining the sides of the corridors we went through. Some had all their teeth and limbs, some didn’t. Some wounds were bandaged, some were not.

There were no single rooms to my recollection, but rather large wards, with beds in what seemed to me to be random places.

My strongest memory is of an elderly woman in a nightie sitting in a wheelchair next to her bed in the middle of the ward

When I arrived a step in front of my dad, she reached her arms out, pulled me close to her, and petted my head. She smelled funny and scared me a little–her quasi-hug was so intense.

She reached into the drawer of a small night stand next to her bed, and offered me a stale butter cookie from a round, blue cookie tin and I took it, feeling that it was somehow necessary for me to do so.

I didn’t understand what this place was. It made no sense to me. I had nothing to compare it to.

It was hard for me to comprehend that these people had no home and no one to take care of them. That the sight of a child was a precious commodity.

These were the things my father explained to me on our way home and yet I didn’t fully understand the implications of the experience for a very long time.

Events like this pose questions; the answers to these questions change our perspectives as we grow.

Growing up is like this; questioning everything that is not our experience: why these kids were growing up without a father, why this kid had only half an arm, why these kids were so mean to everyone, why your friends down the street had to move away.

As we grow and learn about other things and people, we learn about ourselves.

We (hopefully) learn gratitude and open-mindedness eventually turning tolerance for that which we don’t understand, into acceptance and understanding.

If you grow up and go to college, join the military, jump out into the workforce, or even hop a freight train to California as one classmate of mine did, you meet so many people with such different backgrounds and you begin to realize how different we all are, how much the same we all are, and how much is really out there, how much you haven’t experienced.

All this changes or solidifies your perspective.

The experience of having children and being a parent, all the jobs you have, books you read, places you go, people you meet, things you choose to do, the relationships you have, the things you see, the things you say, the things others say…all these things have a hand in your perspective.

There should never be a time where we don’t continue to experience and evolve; growth should be a lifelong process.

Sometimes, we get the experiences we get and sometimes we get to choose the experiences we want to have. Either way, they all have an effect on how we relate to, and see the world around us.

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What were some of the experiences that grew your perspective into what it is today? Please share some of them in the comments. Your stories help shape others’ perspectives.

Next week, we’ll look at growing into our place in the universe.