Viewpoint

Other day my friend narrated a story which goes like this…

A young man, an amateur photographer, was travelling in a bus through a mountainous area. He decided to get down mid way; so that he could click some photos. After he got down, the bus moved on and he stopped at the small tea stall for a refreshing tea. The bus had barely moved forward when the disaster struck. A huge boulder loosened by recent landslide, crashed on the bus, smashing the bus to pieces and killing everybody aboard that bus and there was utter mayhem in the area.

When the normalcy returned, the tea stall owner and other onlookers said to the young man, “How lucky you are. Just a difference of few minutes and you would have been killed by landslide.”

Stunned by the turn of events and by this reaction he said, “I wish I were on that bus.”

Now it was the turn of the crowd to get startled.

He said “If I had remained on the bus instead of alighting, I would not have wasted precious little time that the bus required to get ahead of the place and the boulder would have fallen after the bus had passed. I could have saved the bus and other fellow passengers”

As I started to ponder over what evoked such contrasting thoughts, I realized, what separated the young man and the crowd was the attitude or the viewpoint..

While young man’s view was more universal, all-inclusive; the crowd’s reaction was self centered.

Haven’t we heard that two people can look at the exact same thing and see something totally different?

Stalagmite is Stalactite turned upside down…

Crest is Trough turned upside down… 

A glass could be Half Filled or Half Empty…

A birthday would either enrich your life by a year or it would take you one year closer to death…

Butterfly could be end of Caterpillar…

Man (generic for Man and Woman) has better eye sight than the Sun, for he can ‘see’ the darkness whereas Sun can’t…

It’s often said mother gives birth to a child, but as somebody has rightly countered, child gives birth to mother…

Opposite of success may not always be failure it could be quitting…

It’s the way we look at things that make all the difference and we always see the world not the way it is but the way we perceive it. How else would you explain the death of a ‘mad dog’?

In Islington, there lived a man revered by one and all. The man befriended a dog, but when pique began, the dog bit the man. Everyone was convinced that the dog has gone mad to bite such a noble man and was damn sure that the man would die. But surprise oh surprise!!!! it was the dog that died..(An elegy on the death of a mad dog by Oliver Goldsmith)

As the adage goes, Thomas Edison (inventor of lightbulb) failed more than 1,000 times when trying to create the light bulb".  When asked about it, Edison said, "I have not failed 1,000 times.  I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb."

Doesn’t this emphasize that it’s the way we look at things that make all the difference and we always see the world not the way it is but the way we perceive it or the way we want to see it. Don't we know the story of elephant and four blind men?

As Peter Parker says (Spiderman 3) “It's the choices that make us who we are, and we can always choose to do what's right”. Now the question is how we want to see the world, whether through the eyes of a young man or through the eyes of crowd, whether we want to see butterfly or rue over the caterpillar’s end. 

Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpho

If we do not have the vision of young man then are we prepared to take that long journey, are we prepared to make a conscious effort to develop a vision like him…the choice, my dear friends, is well and truly ours…..