The Importance of Perspective!

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What do I mean by perspective?  It’s typically defined as a technique of depicting volumes and spatial relationships of objects. Rather I am referring to the state of one’s ideas, facts known and their interrelationship.
I want to shape a broader perspective from which to sense, categorize, measure and codify experience, while broader point of views can help to better navigate one’s way through life, its consequences and meaning.

For example, certain thoughts and ideas can shape perspective:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
— A passage from John Donne’s poem.

And yet, graveyards are full of indispensable people!

Everyone knows the importance of friendships and it’s chronicled in this famous anonymous quote:

“There are good ships, there are wood ships, there are ships that sail the sea. But the best ships are friendships, and may they always be.”

And yet, consequential strangers can be as vital to our well-being, growth, and day-to-day existence as family and close friends.

Our choices can have consequences. It’s ironic in Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” he seems to trivialize the consequence of not taking the other road in his poem’s ending.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
–Robert Frost

And yet, Robert Frost made choices that had catastrophic impact on his family. He had this gift and he sacrificed everything including his family to nurture this gift!

Milan Kundera’s book,  “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” offers up an entirely different perspective. Set in Prague in the late 1960s and 1970s. It explores Czech society under the oppression of Soviet invasion and occupation.
It contends that the heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

Conversely, the absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose, weight or lightness?

And yet we have but one life to live and it begs the question can we be that casual about our existence?