Perspectives
I was giving two guys a ride home from a Memorial Day Party yesterday who were discussing their past relationships. The one guy asked the other guy what he thought about meeting an ex-girlfriends new boy friend at the party and the other guy responded that he didn’t want to know who any of his former loves were now dating/married to. The second guy went on to say (although crudely) that if he had his way no one that he dated would ever date after him. I asked the guys if that meant that my marriage ended perfectly and explained to them that after leaving me my ex-wife entered an Eastern Orthodox Christian monastery. The response of both men was “Yes, it ended perfectly for you! You could not have asked for a better ending!”
I would never wish loneliness on anyone and thus disagree with the guys position that he hoped every woman he dated remained single after him. However, their sharing their point of view certainly did make me feel a little better about the end of my marriage. Which brings me to my point about perspectives. Sometimes we are so hyper focused on our own view of the things that are going on in our lives that we fail to see it from the point of view of others. Often times when we see things from the point of view of another we can have a totally different outlook on life.
I chose the photo from a cherry tree in my yard for this post about perspectives because in the photo only the ends of the Pistals and Stamens in the flower are in focus. The rest of the photo is out of focus due to the wide open aperture of the lens. It perfectly illustrates how my point of view of the end of my marriage was so narrowly focused that I failed to see it from any other point of view, which might have had a much better point of view than I had. Thus I encourage you, if you find yourself looking at something that doesn’t seem favorable to you, before you get yourself all worked up about it, take a step back or to the side and look at the situation from a different perspective.