Gazing at the Star

Perspective is what you get when you are forced to take a step back from a situation and are thereby given the opportunity to analyze it objectively. It is not something you can give yourself, because it is by definition something you never think you need. It is however absolutely necessary if you are to learn from your own actions, and not keep making the same mistakes.

An object lesson is where you are put into the shoes of the person whose viewpoint you are learning about. It is a singularly effective way to force someone to carefully consider their position and shock them out of simple habitual belief. I have experienced this shock twice in recent memory. The first time, I asked a coworker to search through some DVDs for graphics that we could use in our presentation. I thought little of the request when I made it, but then she said no. When I wondered why, she suggested that I do it instead. No sooner had I contemplated doing it myself then I immediately recognized the onerous nature of the task, deciding that it was not worth doing after all. I apologized, and then did it anyway, because one should never ask someone else to do something you are unwilling to do yourself.
The second object lesson in recent memory revolves around the difficulty of communication. It is hard to say things to people sometimes, and when someone makes that effort, it is nice to get a response, demonstrating acknowledgment of that effort. Unfortunately, as is all too often the case with things that are difficult to say, the immediate instinctive response is stunned silence, while you try and figure out the right thing to say, followed by continuing silence as the moment to say what you just thought of has passed. I was on the receiving end of this a few days ago, which immediately brought to mind the time a few weeks ago, when I was on the sending end. I’m sorry for sending, for I now know what it feels like to receive.

When I was a freshman in college, the Texas Hold’em craze swept the nation, and it did not miss our little corner of the world, so when I came home for breaks, I found all of my friends playing. Being a smart, confident fellow, I felt that I could probably pick it up without much trouble (the technique, that is, the rules are trivial). I turned out to be right, and I did okay for the first couple of times I played. Then my dad bought me a book on the game. I, of course, pooh-poohed it as unnecessary, but, having nothing better to do before returning to school, read through it anyway. Inside it, I found nothing that I couldn’t have figured out on my own, and in fact, most of it was stuff that I instinctively felt to be true already. However, it was laid out in a clear and logical manner that instinct just doesn’t have. Having that information presented in that way was extraordinarily helpful, I think especially because the information was already in my head, and I was just reorganizing it. That is all.

Twitter is like an away message that stays up even when you’re not online.

Bravery is what happens when self-loathing outweighs fear. When it would be more trying to look in the mirror one more day and see a coward than it would be to suffer the consequences which you fear, you take the risk. Cowardice is everything up until that point.