Monday, December 24, 2007

Perspective

Can you see better in broad daylight?
Or are things clearer at night?
Does sunlight illumine, or obfuscate?
Depends on whether you are looking for a quarter dropped in the grass or looking at stars.
Can you think more clearly when wide awake, or when half asleep?
Sometimes the staggering improbability of the further stretches of quantum physics has a bizarre ring of truth to it. Why should there not be an infinite number of parallel universes, where exists every possible consequence for every possible action, when there is obviously an infinite number of possibilities?
The disputed glass; half-empty or half-full?
It seems to hinge on whether the glass is the one dumped over on your laptop or the one offered to you in the middle of Death Valley.
Is reality pressing in closer when you are depressed, or when you are glad to be alive?
The ambiguity is sometimes disturbing. It seems as if life ought to be true or false, instead of. . . . .an essay question, in which we are graded for effort and creativity.
Sometimes the reasons we have for being discouraged stack up evenly with the reasons we have for being happy.
Hypothetically, should a starving, homeless child in Calcutta be further discouraged by the rain pouring from the sky or delighted that he is alive to experience it?
(I found a challenge to my "don't expect too much out of life" philosophy in a book about Buddha.
A woman sorrowing over the death of her son went to the Buddha to ask him to bring her son back to life.
He answered her request by instructing her to bring him mustard seeds.
Specifically, she was to go throughout the village and obtain mustard seeds from any household where grief and death had not visited.
After going throughout the whole village and finding not one home where death had not been before her, she realized what the Buddha was trying to tell her.
Death and sorrow are facts of life and the sooner she realized this, the sooner she would find inner peace, the Buddhist apologist concluded happily.
It is all a matter of perspective, and no one would have been more cognizant of this than Jesus, yet He sobbed bitterly at the tomb of Lazarus and raised him back to life. This is not to mention the closer parallel of the widow's son.)
Do we suffer sickness and pain and labor at the hands of a capricious Creator or do we churlishly discard each and every nanosecond of the day, looking forward to its end?
We see through a glass darkly and are left the choice, every single day, to make of our existence what we will, until the silver cord is loosed and the golden bowl shattered.
And we are speechless with gratitude for the words of God,
"Let us create man in our own image."

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