Can changing our perspective change everything?
Before you read this, can I invite you to take off your glasses.
Not wearing any?
I beg to differ…
All of us are fitted with a pair of invisible glasses from childhood. They are our lens on the world, shaped by the land we’re born into, the cultures we’re a part of; the family we grow with, the education we receive and the values and mindsets that we are taught.
These glasses help us to form our perspective on the world and make sense of life around us. Many of us don’t ever notice we’re wearing them, as they become so familiar and comfortable, but we all have them, and we see the world through our own particular frames.
Whenever we look at the world through a different lens – perhaps by exploring other cultures, traditions or practices; reading stories from other perspectives; speaking a different language, learning to see something from another’s understanding – our awareness widens to let other perspectives in.
By looking at the familiar through a different lens, we allow ourselves to ask different questions, see different opportunities, reframe viewpoints and allow ourselves to explore ideas from a new, alternative or deeper level.
Widening our perspectives helps us to see other ways of being, doing, thinking, living, relating. It helps us to empathise with others and broaden mindsets to see familiar ideas in new ways.
Over recent human history, we’ve been sold the idea that there is an optimum pair of glasses for all people to be wearing. Ray-Bans, for want of a simple metaphor. We are consistently told (via the media, advertising, geo-politics etc.) that Ray-Bans are the best glasses on the market and the only brand of glasses we should aspire to be wearing as they offer us the best perspective on life.
Unfortunately, Ray-Bans offer a story and way of living which is no longer serving people or planet, as this particular frame of glasses has been created to see the world as separate, disconnected and somewhat abstracted from the bigger view. The more we have globalised and encouraged this world view, the more our planetary crises have grown.
This particular lens and way of living in the world is no longer working.
However there are many other 'pairs of glasses' we can choose to wear and ways of seeing and being in the world that we can inhabit. The world is filled with an extraordinary number of people, of cultures; of ways of being human and offers us a whole array of different lenses through which to see the world. By looking at the world through different social, emotional, cultural lenses we can see much healthier visions of a future in which both people and planet can thrive....
This is an extract taken from Chapter 5: The Future of Education.
Read more by downloading your free copy here: www.thoughtboxeducation.com/ebook
