Perspective

There’s a valuable saying: “Before you criticise someone, walk a mile in their shoes.”

It emphasises the importance of understanding the full context of people’s lives before passing judgement on their actions. Those actions might have been prompted by something in that person’s life that you were totally oblivious to.

Two other benefits are that if you do then criticise them, you’ll be a mile away already, and you’ll have their shoes!

I’ve found from experience that it’s virtually impossible to change anyone’s mind by telling them anything. What does work though is asking questions. It can cause people to change their mind when they need to articulate their position from a novel perspective.

Two more examples of situations where a fresh consideration of perspective gives an interesting outcome: forgiveness and thinking about your own life with FA.

People are frequently flummoxed when someone declares that they forgive another who’s done them a grievous wrong. They think “If someone did that to me I could never forgive them!” Consider it from another perspective and it can look different. The value of forgiveness is to the forgiver not to the forgiven. They no longer carry anger, nor thoughts of vengeance with them. It frees their mind up for happier peaceful thoughts.

I’ve heard the question asked a few times recently “What advice would you give, knowing what you know now, if you could go back in time and advise a newly-diagnosed you?” Even if you put it in the form of a question, a youthful you would probably take no advice from a more mature you anyhow but more importantly, time travel hasn’t been shown to work yet so the value in answering this question is to the you of today. What are you grateful for despite your FA? What’s turned out to be not such a big issue despite your worries at the time it arose?

Visually, perspective is about how things appear smaller from a distance. That’s true in life too, and the distance can be over time.

My personal favourite illustration of perspective is the photograph “Pale Blue Dot” a photo of earth taken from the spaceship Voyager 1 on 14th February 1990. That spaceship launched in September 1977 and on 14th February 1990, its cameras warmed up for more than three hours (it’s cold out there in space) and took this photo of earth, from a distance of six billion kilometres:

Pale Blue Dot (“a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”)

After taking this and a number of other photographs, Voyager 1’s cameras were powered down forever. All the photos are available online. Carl Sagan, planetary scientist, member of the Voyager Imaging Team who helped design and manage many space missions for NASA, wrote the following to accompany the release:

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”