"Things don’t change. You change your way of looking at them. That’s all."
Carlos Castaneda
At first glance, this sentence seems totally obvious. If at first you didn’t like chicken and now you discover that chicken is not as bad as you imagined, then it is your taste that has changed and it is not the taste of the chicken itself which remains obviously the same. Also, if at one time a homosexual couple was seen as something totally strange and unacceptable because it goes against nature, it is now more or less considered normal. The fact itself doesn’t change. It still goes against nature, but people change their way of thinking, their opinion and they accept it. So what impact could looking at things in a different ways have?
Firstly, it lets us view the subject from different perspectives. Although not all of them are correct, they help us examine the matter in more details to reach a better understanding, and even gain new insights from the perspective we may not agree on. Secondly, it is important to keep an overview. We shouldn’t attach ourselves to a single point of view: this makes us become narrow-minded, which could stop our mind from developing intellectually. Finally, looking at problems in different ways usually makes them easier to get solved. You get a bad mark for your geography presentation because you didn’t really understand what you had to do. Instead of complaining and giving up, which won’t change your mark, you should rather consider it as an experience to remind you to be more careful about the instructions next time. Even if it is a failure, you can learn something from it and improve yourself.
Well, things do change sometimes either by chance or by action. But most of the time, action doesn’t come from you. All you can do is to change your way of looking at them as this sentence suggests.
Copyright text: Huong Ly Dang
Illustration: http://www.lookupinfo.org/images/macroc_eye_30042010.jpg
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