Sometimes it looks like all we are really doing is borrowing the words of others to maintain a description of what we see and feel.
Inherently, this is not automatically bad (after all, no ideas are in a vacuum). However, if this stays confined to just what we think we see, we miss the opportunity for any broader perspective. And, too many missed opportunities—other perspectives—invariably seem to lead to a certain degree of distortion (this, by the way, is a direct contradiction to those who claim other perspectives distort the truth).
Somehow, we have to merge what we think we see with what actually is. This requires experiencing something beyond what comes from our normal understanding. It takes some wisdom to do this—usually wisdom from outside of what we tend to try to maintain in our minds.
This can be stretching at times and...liberating.
We are traveling this week to a foreign country. I suspect that we will see many things that, at the very least, operate differently, not to mention the assumptions which drive them. When I was in college, I traveled both to the greater part of Europe and Japan. The implications of what I saw there rocked my paradigm of how I thought things worked (especially my assumptions about the universality of how things worked), including challenging what I thought was even true.
Those experiences set in motion some things that have persisted throughout the balance of my life. And, I think I would have to say looking back that, without those experiences, my view (if not my understanding) of things would most likely remained unaltered.
We continue to borrow (more heavily than we often realize) from what is around us. That seems to be a given. It is the quality of what we are surrounded by that becomes the issue worthy of our consideration. Perhaps, our greatest opportunity is both to acknowledge and appreciate the value of alternative perspectives. The agency involved seems to be our openness and willingness to do so.
It is easy to repeat the not uncommon mantra that it’s important to have perspective. Wisdom, though, seems to include the conscious choices we make to pursue it.
