Perspective and the Other

Yesterday I noticed the moon, it was a mere whisper. A loud whisper yes, but it wasn't the usual moon that boasted about her existence. She was humble. And much like the crescent moon and star found in Islam, the moon had company. Let me tell you, the sky didn't need to be black for it to be beautiful. With a not quite midnight blue color, the sky was beautiful. But most of all, the moon and that star. Slowly though I noticed another star. And then another. It had taken me sometime. More time that I wish to admit. Maybe, if I hadn't looked any longer, I wouldn't have seen those other stars. They would have gone unnoticed, by me.

People are like that. They go unnoticed, they remain in the background. They shouldn’t but they do. They can either shine as bright as those bigger stars or planets. Or like the moon, they can steal the light of another, or rather, share it. However, not everyone has it in them, to shine. Not all of us have that quality. And so others should grow dimmer. Everyone should be of the same brightness, so that all the stars are noticed.

The latter though, isn’t a solution. The world isn’t a place where selfishness or greed doesn’t exist. No one would step back just because another can’t step forward. We are always competing against each other, and against time. And our selves.

A recent IISuperwomanII video spoke about living our dreams, and how our dreams cannot be realized if we don’t work extremely hard for it. Yet, if we spend our lives trying to get to the top of the ladder, we will have no time to look up at the sky. Nor can we be like those brightly shining stars. Because money, wealth, titles and so on, don’t make you shine. The materialistic possessions you spend your days collecting will make you less easy to remember. Its love, kindness, selflessness that makes people shine brighter. This takes me to a certain someone.

A friend, if you could still call him that, always kept telling me to change my perspective on things. “Shailee, don’t look at the world from your own eyes. Change your perspective,” he would say things to that effect. And I kept telling him that I do that, but it doesn’t work. Recently, after it was too late, I admitted something, to my self. I didn’t know what he meant. I wanted to ask him, “What do you mean? How can I look through the eyes of another?”

Before I did anything silly and bothered my friend about my questions about life and perception and whatnot, help came to me. Well, kind of. I recently bought By the River Piedra I Sat Down & Wept by Paulo Coelho. The book is mentioned here because of one thing Pilar, the protagonist is told by her childhood friend. It’s about an exercise, where you look at your Other. Now the Other is in a sense our ego. Where you think twice about everything, you say no to adventure. In the Coelho’s book, a story is shared about the Other.

A man runs into an old friend who had somehow never been able to make it in life. “I should give him some money,” he thinks. But instead he learns that his old friend has grown rich and is actually seeking him out to repay the old debts he had run up over the years.

They go to a bar they used to frequent together, and the friend buys drinks for everyone there. When they ask him how he became so successful, he answers that until only a few days ago, he had been living the role of the “Other.”

“What is the Other?” they ask.

“The Other is the one who taught me what I should be like, but not what I am. The Other believes that it is our obligation to spend our entire life thinking about how to get our hands on as much money as possible so that we will not die of hunger when we are old. So we think so much about money and our plans for acquiring it that we discover we are alive only when our days on earth are practically done. And then it’s too late.”

“And you? Who are you?”

“I am just like everyone else who listens to their heart: a person who is enchanted by the mystery of life. Who is open to miracles, who experiences joy and enthusiasm for what they do. It’s just that the Other, afraid of disappointment, kept me from taking action.”

“But there if suffering in life,” one of the listeners said.

“And there are defeats. No one can avoid them. It’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggle for your dreams than to be defeated without ever even knowing what you’re fighting for.”

“That’s it?” another listener asked.

“Yes, that’s it. When I learned this, I resolved to become the person I had always wanted to be. The Other stood there in the corner of my room, watching me, but I will never let the Other into my self again – even though it has already tried to frighten me, warning me that it’s risky to not think about the future.

“From the moment I ousted the Other from my life, the Divine Energy began to perform its miracles.”

This Other is the perception most of us have of life. We study hard, we find a job that pays well, and we go on in life. Sometimes some of our dreams do come true. And yet, we always take small steps, we always think about tomorrow. We keep letting the Other make decisions for us.

In the end success doesn’t matter. The Other doesn’t matter. The fact that the Other is lying in a corner, screaming for attention doesn’t matter. Change your perspective and live your dreams. And this is how you can be one of those brightly shining stars.

We once had a psychology lecture in school. We were told about Autistic people. The fact that some of them draw so well is because they don’t first look at the point of focus or the subject of a scene. So they would first notice the background. They would notice all those details and then look at the subject. And so they notice more. They notice the stars that shine less brightly. They notice the wisps of clouds. And they notice the shades of the sky. They notice all this before they notice the moon, and the brighter stars.