“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”  ~Anaïs Nin

 

“As far as the Moon is concerned, he is always full.”  ~Terri Guillemets

 

We judge others by their behavior.  We judge ourselves by our intentions.  ~Ian Percy

 

“Is the glass half empty, half full, or twice as large as it needs to be?”  ~Author Unknown

 

These are a few of my favorite quotations about perspective. Each person sees things differently – out of his or her own eyes. Our beliefs, our experiences and many other things can shape our perspective.

I had a very practical reminder of this fact recently. One of my friends is launching a new business and she asked me to take a look at her web site before it went live. Since she lives in another state, we spoke by telephone as we walked through the website and tested each link together. Although the content and overall design was quite good, I raised a few questions about formatting. I mentioned that the he alignment on some of the pages was so far right that it overlapped the right border. But for some reason, she did not see it.  I also noticed the color of the footer, black, seemed a little dark. But for some reason she did not see that either. She saw the footer as blue. How very odd! Even though we were looking at the same pages, we saw different things. We went around and around trying to figure out what the problem was. Eventually we realized that we were on different types of computers (she was on a PC & I was on a Mac) with different sized monitors (hers was 19” and mine was 15”), so the content was displaying differently. After our call she went back to her web designer and asked her to redesign the site so that it displayed the same way for all platforms and mobile devices.

This experience taught me an important lesson about perspective. Since we were both looking at the same website, I assumed that she saw what I saw, & vice versa. That happens so often in life because we assume that other people see things the way we see them.

“A child on a farm sees a plane fly overhead and dreams of a faraway place.  A traveler on the plane sees the farmhouse below and dreams of home.”  ~Robert Brault

Everything depends on what you see. Differences in perspective can also be a great source of conflict in marital relationships. After several decades of a wonderful marriage I can attest to the fact that men are REALLY different from women. And our perspectives are quite different also.  Needless to say my husband and I have had some lively conversations about numerous subjects over the years. But we have made it a point to hear each other’s side and at least acknowledge that there could be another perspective.

Differences in perspective have led to major conflicts throughout the ages; divorces, religious crusades, political conflict and even world wars.

If we are going to have successful relationships, we would be wise to recognize that fact that there is always another perspective – another way of looking at things.

Do you see what I see? Probably not. Do I see what you see? Probably not. But once we acknowledge that there is another perspective, we can work at finding common ground.