Perspective (according to me): Seeing something from a different angle than before that then changes your opinion or broadens your tolerance or challenges your belief. The more dogmatic your position, the more you may need perspective.
Example: Leaf Blowers
I used to hate, HATE leaf blowers. They are noisy. And while I find nothing quite so peaceful as the rustling of fall leaves in the breeze, all too often that peaceful sound would be interrupted by the obnoxious din of the air blowing monster known as the leaf blower.
Leaf blowers caused noise pollution. Air pollution. They were a menace to society.
I used speak with disdain about people using leaf blowers and then going to the gym for exercise because if they just spent some time raking up a yard full of leaves, they would get all the workout they'd need. After all, I was doing it. So should they.
I was very proud of my position, not to mention my physical prowess with a yard implement.
But then something happened.
It always does.
Perspective rarely changes of its own free will.
Enter the Tarlov cysts. They sit in my sacrum and, when inflamed, leave me feeling like someone has taken a baseball bat to my lower spine, butt, and lady parts. What inflames them? Lifting (anything more than two gallons of milk...some days way less). Pushing. Pulling. Bending repeatedly. All the things I do when I am doing the things I love, like moving furniture, hauling junk to the dump, mowing the lawn, raking leaves.
Raking leaves. Hmmmm. Suddenly, the only way I can do what I normally do is not with a rake and the good old muscles and grit of my prideful youth but with the dad gum leaf blower. The very machine I reviled for much of my adult life.
And now I am thankful for my leaf blower. My beautiful, hardworking leaf blower, that enables me to still, to some extent, be me.
And so, my friends, if you ever encounter a friend who seems to have changed, whether it's their opinion on something as mundane as a leaf blower or their formerly dogmatic belief about much more consequential things, just know that they may have changed because something happened and they see things differently now.
They got perspective.
