Inauguration (on Perspective)

It’s the middle of March, and the quarter at school has just ended. It went well as an exercise in reestablishing long-disused patterns of thought and behavior.

I don’t really know if I’m old enough to claim the perspective of “looking back,” but I like to think I’m a bit wiser than I was at 18. I know a little more about the world, and a little more about myself. I don’t claim to know a lot about either. I’m still learning how to handle my life, and hopefully I’m making better decisions.

A lot has changed since that whirlwind summer of ’03. We as a world have finished (or are about to finish, depending on your calendar) the first decade of the 21^st Century and the world around us has gotten a lot smaller thanks to places exactly like this. Here in America, we’ve ended a war, started another, ridden the wave of an economical high as it crested and then been dumped face-first onto the hard-packed beaches of recession. We’ve come up with some good analogies, and some bad ones. We’ve inaugurated our first nonwhite President. We’ve inaugurated our first openly nerd President.^[1]

I, too, have changed some. I’ve fallen in love, been heartbroken, moved on; fallen in love again. I’ve succeeded, I’ve failed; I’ve learned a lot from both. I’ve made friends, I’ve lost friends. I’ve hardened some against the cruelties of the world, but I’ve also decided that nothing –no person, no thing and no event- is worth losing the ability to see the beauty in the world.

Above all, I endure. I go on and live, because that is the greatest revenge to those who have wronged me, and the greatest thanks to those who have helped me.

Perspective is a funny thing. We don’t have it until after we need it, and it often comes from an unexpected quarter. The things that can change our perspective are often the little things, the personal things, rather than the huge world-shaking events that are easy for an individual to ignore because our perspective isn’t large enough to accommodate it.

Perspective is ever-changing, too, often in a way too subtle for us to notice. Experience piles up and things change, little by little. It’s a rare event that forces us to peer through the looking glass and evaluate ourselves –most people are afraid to look, fearing what they might learn as the truth about themselves.

Am I, at the midpoint of my second decade of life, old enough to claim to have a wise perspective? Probably not, but I’ve at least learned enough to know how little I’ve really learned, and that counts for something.

For now, I’m making progress. I’m learning, I’m sorting things out, and I’m headed in a direction I like. Time will tell if I walk that path alone or with companions, but either way, it’s high time I hit the metaphorical road.

[1] - Obama's not a terrorist, oh no. He's something much worse. He's posed in front of the White House with a lightsaber, joked about the dilithium crystals on his wife's belt, and is reportedly a dust-covers-and-backboards comic book collector. Obama is a nerd. Obama is One Of Us.