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Goooood Morning SuperForest!
I recently made an amazing road trip with SuperForesters Kate and Baloo. We three set out from Los Angeles a week ago, drove from there to Desert Hot Springs, from there to Flagstaff, Flagstaff to Albuquerque, and then on to Santa Fe for a few days. Our purpose: To visit friends and retrieve the contents of a mysterious storage locker. Also, since Baloo was along for the ride, I got to take lots of pictures of him. :)
The trip from LA to Santa Fe is a long one. Our sojourn to Desert Hot Springs added a few hundred miles to the trip, making it approximately seventeen hundred miles in total. Since we had a lot of time to talk, Kate and I eventually found ourselves in a very interesting discussion about perspective. Allow me to paraphrase some of my thoughts regarding that conversation…
The difference perspective can make in our lives is astounding, as it literally creates our experiences in real time. Our perspective can help determine how we think and feel about the world around us. And new perspective is a relatively easy thing to get, provided that your consciously open and ready for it.
Firstly, we must define our term. Here, we shall take “perspective” to mean “the window through which one views the world.” The world here can mean both the external and internal world. Every person looks at the world through the window of their own life experiences, the lucky few are able to step away from their own windows, and imagine what it’s like to visit and peer through other people’s windows, or even the multiverse of windows within ourselves.
Take for instance this example, we’ll call it the “Friend’s Spare Bedroom Scenario”
You fly into a new city, where a friend lives. The friend has offered you his spare bedroom. The weather as you land is frightfully cold, and you are relieved to find a cab and get to your friend’s house. Once there you find that the “spare bedroom” is really just a small couch in the living room. The couch is quite old, smells of dog, and is five feet long. You might be bummed out at the sight of this little couch that will obviously be too small to stretch out on. You might let that slight feeling of dismay effect the way you act around your friend. This tiny couch might totally obsess your thoughts. A snowstorm sets in and now you and your friend are stuck inside and you’ve been acting weird.
And SCENE…
Okay, same scenario, you’re flying into town and your friend has offered you a room, and you land and the weather is really bad. But in this scenario, the cab you’re riding in skids on some ice and slides into a fresh snowdrift, and then the storm really picks up, and other cars start sliding around too, and the freeway gets totally backed up and you end up spending nine hours in an unheated cab waiting for help with Igdor the Cabbie, who hasn’t showered, refuses to run the engine, (and thus the heat,) because gas is $3.48 a gallon and since you’re not moving the meter isn’t running.
Eventually, the tow truck arrives, yanks the cab out of the drift and back onto the road, and nine and a half hours after you left the airport, you at last arrive at your friend’s house, where you happily collapse onto his tiny couch, which feels like a California King-sized bed, where you happily snooze in the warmth and heat, until your friend wakes you up with strong black coffee, and you laugh and tell him the story and you both feel great as the snowstorm sets in.
Same small, uncomfortable couch, two very different mindsets.
And here’s the bestest part!
Scenario three: A friend has offered you a spare room in a new city and you arrive and get a cab to his house as the weather gets really bad. While you sit in the cab on the way to your friend’s house, a little fantasy plays in your head. The fantasy is the first two scenarios I described to you. First, you imagine that when you arrive at your friend’s house, instead of a nice spare bedroom, he’s only got a small couch in the living room for you to sleep on. You chuckle as you fantasize arriving and being dismayed at this small couch. You then laugh even harder when you think of how awful it could potentially be to spend nine plus hours trapped in a cab with Igdor, nice though he is and very forgiving of your back seat chuckling.
You decide then and there that whatever situation you arrive in when you get to your friend’s house, you will arrive in the mindset of a man who has just spent nine hours in a freezing cold cab, and is unbelievably happy and grateful to have finally arrived.
A simple game in your mind has given you the space and humility to see every moment as an opportunity! Ha ha ha! Games win!
When you finally arrive at your friend’s house in real life, you will be delighted if there’s a full-sized bedroom waiting for you, and you will laugh heartily to yourself if there is only the aforementioned tiny couch.
If you can play games in your head, where you allow yourself to taste the entire rainbow of possible experiences including the really unpleasant ones, you are suddenly more aware of just how great things actually are. And so perspective, even derived from a simple mind game, can give you mental space, room to breathe with intention, and increase your happiness quotient. You will find that with practice, playing mind games will make it so that you are flexible in any situation and never disappointed, as you can easily imagine a scenario where things were much worse. This flexible perspective will in turn make you happier, more easily satisfied, and generally what people describe as “easy going.” Win.
The next time you are feeling frustrated with somebody, play this game in your head: Imagine the person who has been frustrating you standing in front of you. He or she is exactly the same size they are in real life. Now, imagine that they are a hundred feet tall. You are still your normal size, they now tower above you. As a result, you are now looking directly up, into their gigantic, cavernous nostrils. Each of their nostrils is now the size of a manhole cover, and within each one twirls a shiny tangle of nose hair. They are so big as to be of utter insignificance to you. So big that they must move very slowly, and you are free to run very fast as far and as quick as you please! Wheee! Allow yourself to empathize with the massive person, so alone and gigantic. Imagine their gigantic farts!
Ha ha ha! Let’s all have a chuckle!
Now, do the opposite. You are now a hundred feet tall, with manhole cover-sized nostrils of your very own. You peer down from up high at the tiny little human who had been causing you grief. Look at the tiny little man or woman. Look how tiny they seem, next to your school bus-sized feet! They are but tiny little insects compared to your massive hugeness. Empathize with the circumstances of the tiny little human, who will never get to live with its heads in the sweet air that your lucky head gets to live in. Look up at the clouds so close now to your head. So close you can reach up and trail your fingers through them. A mountain is now your pillow. The seas are now your splashing pool. You are endless and eternal. The world scurries by under your unconcerned feet as you smile and let birds nest in your patient, unmoving crevices.
Now you’re back to being you. Let the game end gently. Smile at the person who previously had brought you grief. Remember them as giant, huge-nostriled behemoths. Remember them as tiny, scurrying creatures. Remember that they can be anything you want them to be, as you are the hero in this movie, and you are writing the movie as you go.
So, back to the road trip.
We drove across a third of America, Kate, Baloo, and I, and along the way I couldn’t help but notice what seemed like a palpable sadness. Things are getting very expensive, gas is expensive, and there are empty buildings everywhere. America looks to me like a museum to the glory days of capitalism and endless gasoline. Hopeless, jobless, littered, spoiled… But that’s just one way to see it.
I looked out the window of the car as I was driving and I saw the greatest opportunity of our lives.
America is ready and waiting for new growth! Young growth! Hope growth!
This country is laying fallow like a field left to grow wild and it is ready for the young energy of young Americans.
The Re-Wilding of America! The greatest game we’ll all ever play and we can play it together.
Here’s what I mean: Drive across America and there is very little personality. It’s basically the same food and goods chains over and over again, in malls that all look the same. Or at least, it used to be, now it’s looking pretty empty.
So now we can remake the empty spaces, (i.e. all of America) into whatever we like.
(image via flickr user tobym)
These empty malls could house thriving communities of people who are making things out of recycled materials. Making new things out of the old things. Making art! Making goods. Making love! Dancing. Tear up the old parking lots, put in gardens. The empty Quiznos becomes a yoga center. The roofs of the buildings are soon covered in plants. People could live and work and share spaces and raise children like we have for so many hundreds of thousands of years. Community organizing now takes new meaning. And because we all have internet access and facebook pages, who we are is now an easy thing to double check. Digital trust, yo! So, like, it’s all a big game now, and America is the game board.
(image via flickr user wilhelmina_wonka)
When people are free to create, then they create art, and an America covered in art would be a great thing. It would give our cities personality again, a personality beyond simple geography. Then instead of the usual directions involving numbers and street signs, you could say: “Turn left at the statue of the Floating Coffee Cup, left again at the Romantic Robot..
(image via flickr user Great Beyond)
Then turn right at the Concrete Brontosaurus and you’re here!”
(image via flickr user bunnicula)
America is waiting for creative and energetic people to remake it, and we are seeing the signs of this new growth everywhere we look.
The world that is ending if the world of separation and needless anxiety over money issues. The world that is just beginning is one where humans matter more than money, and we are all connected via technology, to both each other and the natural world around us. This new world is one where no one starves come Winter, because every human life is valued as being far more valuable than the materials and energy necessary to sustain that human. This new attitude allows for renewed growth, using the abundant materials at our fingertips.
Profit-over-people has run its course, and America is now ready for the People-over-profit world to bloom into existence.
It’s all just a matter of perspective.
As you look at the world around you, pay special attention to the perspectives being offered to you. Then ask yourself: How would I like to see the world? As one of endless opportunity and growing togetherness? Or as a hopeless slide into nothingness?
Ask yourself: Who am I in this scenario? What part will I play in this grand play?
Will you be a hero, helping your fellow humans see the possibilities and the hope? Will you run from it all, move to Alaska and hide in a cabin, rifle at the ready? You can be anything in the perspective game, and if you control the perspective game, then you control real life.
I’m making up a story about a race of incredible beings who saw that there was a problem, and then came together to do something about it.
Massive LOVE to All.
-Jackson
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