Why changing PERSPECTIVES makes us more aware?

Sometimes all you have to do is, take a step back and look again. 

                                               



Perspective literally means the process by which we recognize, interpret and analyze every situation. Psychologists say we like and interact with people who perceive, comprehend, deduce and even think akin to us. 

Not in the sense of our shared movie actor’s obsession or over the favorite cuisine we savor together with them. But on more serious and life guiding values, our take on capital punishment, religion, politics and God. The complexities of the universe, the deep complex subjects on which the world is almost divided into groups here, where we look for similarity in thoughts, people who like us and think alike. 

Here where we reject even the smallest chance of interaction with someone who opposes what we feel is the right take on a matter. We want everyone to think in homogeneity to us. All of our debates or even discussions aim to propagate and imprint our thinking in the minds of others, not realizing the same is happening to us.

Why do we want to assert our thinking? Where we yes, WE could be completely wrong! What would a world look like where everyone would think the same? STAGNANT. With no variation in our thoughts we will make the world motionless, lifeless, static and putrid. We need clashing, different opinions to grow and thrive as individuals and as a whole humanity consortium. 

We need to be welcoming to the conflicting opinions and not orthodox and rigid on our fixed perspectives. When we invite contrary and conflicting opinions into our brains and let them intertwine with ours we come up and produce a hybrid. A third take which is much more authentic and reliable than the two ideas individually.  

But the very process of letting the foreign and somewhat alien views into our own may feel daunting, and anything that doesn’t promote our way of thinking is considered as an enemy and shuts it down. Our brain doesn’t want any discomfort, it is satiated with the fallacious or incorrect perspective that is originally formed and wouldn’t do the hard work of introducing something opposing.  That is the reason why it takes a great deal and willpower to change our perspective once it is concrete and has taken structure. 

What we don’t realize is the foreign idea is disguised as a helper to either strengthen our existing belief or adopting a fresh perspective all together. People don’t like to be labelled and not to be labelled wrong, and even a minor disagreement hits on the ego trigger and we adopt a self-defensive mechanism of shutting anything and either abuse or start abhorring the person more than his ideas.  

Maybe for once we are wrong or maybe we are right but we can never be sure we can only be sure of one thing that is we are uncertain, and that uncertainty is what it is important that uncertainty is something that you need to acknowledge that any moral or any social obligation that is been created is never absolute and that there can be another altogether parallel universe where all those things you term as inhumane, sinful and devious aren’t wrong, maybe that’s the right way to live. 

So stop shutting yourself down from having conversations with people who have different opinions than you maybe you feel enraged and do not agree with any of their notion and maybe your blood boils with their every syllable. 

You are free to disagree and hate their perspective. But their perspective is only a part of them try looking beyond the perspective because perspective itself is subjective and self created and maybe you are just a not so great creator. You will become better and a lot wiser when you interact, not with just your “type” and broaden your horizons.