The Other Side

Most of us are creatures of habit. There are a select few who don't sit at their own place in a room, but for the most part - we do. We have our seat at the table, our way of loading the dishwasher, our habits and our rituals.

These can be useful when trying to navigate extremely busy schedules (which are so common these days) and a thousand details. But once in a while it's helpful and healthy to look at things from the other side. Your office looks one way, because you sit one way, your house looks a certain way, because of where you sit and what you do.

What if you walk to the other side of the room? What if you sit on the other side of the table? What if you park somewhere else?

The act of consciously doing things differently gives us new perspective. From the other side of the room, the house looks very different. When we are willing to break out of our molds and habits, it refreshes us, and reminds us that life is a multi-faceted gem of vast beauty when it is seen from many, many angles.

Northern Germany and northern California are wet, wet, wet. Hamburg is the greenest city in Europe - completely unexpectedly - and San Francisco defies the rules of sunny California and has more grey and rainy days than you'd think. Rain doesn't feel lilke anything special in either of those places, and people tend to wish for sunny days. But come to the desert and rain is so precious that you can actually catch yourself praying for it and shouting with joy when it cascades across the vast skies, pounding down on the dry plains before it passes on to the mountains.

Life offers so many vastly different experiences if we are willing to move to the other side to get a fresh perspective. We think we know life because of habitual experiences, but what we know is the habit, and within the habit we often stop seeing.

Today - try it - walk to the other side of the room and have a look. Take a different route to work and have a look. Speak differently and have a look. Sit at another place at the table and have a look. Today - go to the other side and see how different and new like looks. With this newly garnered perspective, life takes on whole new dimensions.

Blessings.
- Darshan

© 2009 Darshan F Jessop