Pondering Perspective
I took my first writing class at Esalen Institute in Big Sur in the fall of 2012, a few months after my father died. It changed my life. The remarkable writing teacher, Laura Davis, told us at the outset of the workshop that if we plan on writing anything autobiographical, we need to give up the hope that our family stories will feel accurate to everyone involved. Each person’s unique history influences their reactions, assumptions, and ultimately, their memories. Additionally, our point of view can shift significantly from one year to the next, or even day by day. It’s simply impossible for us to see a world that isn’t shaped by our own changeable emotions and projections.
“The Chatter of the Hidden Birds” by Patrice Vecchione (2014)
Another huge lesson I came away with was that we can glean tremendous insight from consciously choosing to shift our perspective. I wrote about this in an article published last year in Spirituality & Health magazine called, “Coronavirus from the Perspective of Mother Earth,” when sheltering-in-place had just begun and my anxiety level was high. I began the article by sharing how impacted I was by one of the first prompts in Laura’s writing class: Tell me the story of your family from the point of view of your kitchen table. My story was narrated by the voice of the kitchen table in the Manhattan apartment where I spent my high school years—a time when my mother was deeply depressed and spent virtually all of her time in bed. During all those years, I can’t remember our family ever once sitting around that table together. Except for when we went out to a restaurant, each of us ate on our own.
“I’d always cataloged this situation as part of my personal sob story—it was on the list of the many things I should have experienced, but never did,” I wrote. “Astonishingly, describing our household from the point of view of the table changed everything. Having that impartial object bear witness to my mother’s sadness and defeat enabled me, for the very first time, to acknowledge the depth of her suffering, and to feel compassion instead of anger. It was no longer all about me.”
Last March, as I lay awake in the wee hours of the morning worrying about the pandemic, I remembered this cathartic experience and began to wonder if a dramatic shift in my perspective could lead to insights I couldn’t access from my current point of view. What if I look at this pandemic from the perspective of the earth? What might our beautiful, abused planet have to say to the most disruptive of her millions of species right now? This gave me loads of ideas about why humans desperately needed a time out to reflect on the direction we’re headed at this point in our evolution. I jumped out of bed and wrote my heart out.
A big part of my father’s healing journey was constantly trying to shed light on the subjective character of his conditioning. He’d often ponder different perspectives, asking himself things like, “What if I’d been born on a different continent, into a different race and religion? What if I’d been taller or shorter by eight inches?” He even wondered what he might have been like if he’d been born a German between the two world wars instead of a Hassidic Jew in Poland. Would he have become just like the sadistic prison guards that routinely brutalized starving prisoners like himself?
Writing helped my father more fully understand and process what he lived through. The nightmares of concentration camps that plagued him after the war only stopped when he began to write his stories—stories that helped me, and many other people, understand what it was like to walk through life in his shoes.
Patrice Vecchione—the author, poet, artist and writing teacher who is leading our Quest for Eternal Sunshine free “Write Your Mind Open” writing workshop on April 10—created an anthology of over sixty poems about the immigrant and refugee experience by writers from all over the world, Ink Knows No Borders. Reading this powerful book, the intimate details about people leaving the only homes and communities they’ve ever known—often to be impoverished, excluded, bullied and “illegal” in America—helped wake me up to the real hurting human beings embedded in the statistics. Personal stories expand our perspective and help open our minds and hearts.
But as committed as Patrice is to helping us experience empathy for others, she also believes that we must consciously foster empathy for ourselves. “Writing is a way to sort, sift, and reconsider. How a memory appears before writing about it is very different from how it is known afterward. Writing leads us to new perspectives and, suddenly, we are transformed,” she says.
To experience this for yourself, Patrice and I would love you to join us for our free 2-hour writing workshop on Saturday, April 10 at 10 AM PDT. Never-before writers and old-timers are all welcome. Now is a great time for some self-reflection and self-discovery!
Sign up for “Write Your Mind Open”
