Tell a story that is about the listener, not about you.*
(Seth Godin)

What if there’s a different way of seeing things and, so, understanding and, so, living our life differently as a result?

Where we are in our thinking and feeling and doing right now offers us a particular perspective, but what if we move to a different viewpoint or perspective? How will things look then?

Different, I guess.

It turns out that actor and country singer and songwriter Kris Kristofferson loves William Blake, quoting the following words. I offer them here because they are about why it could be important to get a different perspective:

If he who is organised by the divine for spiritual communion, refuse and bury his talent in the earth, even though he should want natural bread, shame and confusion of face will pursue him throughout life to eternity.**

Kristofferson reflects on Blake’s words:

He’s telling you that you’ll be miserable if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do.^

Knowing what we are supposed to do is a different perspective for many people, making it possible to “reset,” to change our way of thinking, feeling and doing.

Or not, if we choose to bury it.

Knowing who we are and what we must do provides us with the best perspective of all, one that is highly adaptive, because we’re in the flow of something we know is never finished, always growing, always changing.

Michelangelo’s unfinished statues hold more beauty for me than his finished ones. Caught in a moment of time, they speak of how much can change before they are completed. Perhaps we only become the finished piece just before we die.

It’s a choice because of the law of human plasticity:

A new “Law” puts all other laws and criteria into an utterly new perspective.^^

Look around. All those people you know so little about – they know something about you that you don’t know about you: it’s a Johari thing:

When you have a growing awareness of how much you don’t know about someone else, you begin to understand how much you don’t know about yourself.*^

We often have to step into a new idea or another’s person’s perspective or a new behaviour to discover more about ourselves.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Tell a better story.)
(**William Blake, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: You’ll be miserable if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do.)
(^Kris Kristofferson, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: You’ll be miserable if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do.)
(^^From Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now.)
(*^From Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation.)