Perspective- Your Prison or Your Passport

Let’s imagine a situation shall we, say you are in a bus and the driver suddenly applies the brakes and your phone falls down. There are a few scratches on the screen guard. What is the first thing that comes to you mind? Is it gratefulness for the fact that the damage was limited to the screen guard or is it anger that now you will have to change it? This is the half glass full or empty situation in modern day terms. You must have already guessed the motive behind my hypothetical situation. It highlights the importance of perspective. The meaning of perspective according to merriam-webster is a mental view or prospect. Perspective is sometimes more important than the situation itself.

So, if you fall into the second category, and can only feel anger for what happened then its high-time that you change your perspective. I am not here to give tips for how to change your perspective because you will get a lot of those if you google the said sentence. Instead I am here to give you reasons on why to change your perspective. I was one of those people always looking at the negative side of things, trying to find problems for solutions. I always thought this was properly analyzing a situation and not giving myself hope unnecessarily. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. After a while I realized what I was doing. I wasn’t being realistic; I was being demoralizing. We often blame others around us for all that goes wrong and we don’t realize that our reaction to what happens is a major part of the equation. Let me again bring out a hypothetical situation. Say, you are baking a cake and you need to add some sugar to it, so you ask your mother for some sugar to put into it and she hands you the salt and only after baking the cake and taking the first eager bite you realize what happened. Obviously, you will not be happy. You spent a lot of time on the cake only for it to be ruined by your mother’s mistake. What would be your next reaction? Would it be anger and resentment or forgiveness and understanding?

Being angry is something human and all of us go through it from time to time some of us more than others. But looking at the negative side of each situation just increases our anger until it reaches to a point where it is no longer natural or something that all of experience. So let’s bring all of this back full circle. Anger, negativity and perspective are very closely related and when one changes all of them do, for better or for worse. So pick your side now because it will play a very important part in your life. I want to end with a beautiful quote by Dr. Dyer, “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at will change.”