Perspective

Perspective is knowing what is possible. Wise, PhD-wielding experts often advise us that our emotions and our viewpoints regarding a given situation depend greatly on our perspective -- our mental coordinates, if you will. If we have prior experience in a given situation, it can provide us with a second, or a slightly broader point of view on the situation, which allows us to more correctly judge the quality of the situation we find ourselves in. As a brief and possibly superfluous example, lets imagine a policeman who at one point in his life had been arrested, and manhandled into a squad car. The knowledge of what it feels like to be on the other end of this interaction would provide him with a fuller picture of it.

You could be excused then, for thinking perspective was a synonym of sympathy, or the ability to share what the other person feels. But it is more than that. As a further example, in one of Cynthia's classes the topic of discussion was pollution. Pollution is bad, everyone agreed. People should do something about it, everyone agreed.
Places like big-cities were often horribly polluted, said one.
What about right here, in Nowy Sacz? asked Cynthia.
Puzzled silence followed. No, they replied. Nowy Sacz wasn't polluted.
Not at all? asked Cynthia, incredulously.
No, not at all, was their consensus.

Now, what is so incredibly instructive about this discussion, is that they all agreed that pollution was a terrible thing, and somebody ought to do something. But never having been out of their region, they don't know what anything else looks like. So they honestly think that concrete buildings turn black within a few years. Public statues normally develop a black coating on all the top surfaces. Buses bellow black huge clouds of black smoke ALL THE TIME. On the tops of homes, stores, from every building, chimneys spew black and white and grey thick clouds of noxious smoke all winter, which literally make you feel like you are choking when you walk through an area where the air (or smoke) is still. Everyone's skin changed within 2 weeks of the beginning of cold weather. One week, everybody looked shiny and clean and healthy, and 2 weeks later they had such an enormous crop of zits it looked like the night of the living pizza faces. All winter you see piles of coal on the sidewalk, which leave great black stains for weeks to come on the sidewalk and in the gutter. Walking along the sidewalk, one has to constantly be aware of phlegm on the ground, as all people, (but mostly men) will bring up, and subsequently share with the world via the sidewalk, large pools of sticky phlegm, another gift of living in coal smoke. They even know that there are no fish in the river next to the town, but claim it is clean. Meanwhile, 30 miles upstream there are fish in the river, and the people living there claim the river is dirty. The evidence is overwhelming, yet if they haven't been anywhere else, this is neither dirty nor clean - it just is. Not knowing what is possible causes one to believe that what one sees is what must be, an inescapable reality, as opposed to a changeable happenstance.

Thus gaining wider experiences allows one to envision a wider range of possible realities, possible outcomes, and to strive for the one that most effectively embodies an appropriate mix of the ideal and the attainable. And without a wide range of experiences, you have much greater difficulty envisioning the steps to take you from where you are to you know not where. And as one grows older, and more set in one's habits, routines, and comfortable environments, the less likely one is to seek out, or encounter experiences which broaden one's idea of the possible. Thus, as I age, my options will slowly become more and more limited along with my ideas. And that is truly tragic.