Oliver Wendell Holmes said that ‘A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.’

Whether that’s true or not I’m not sure, and I certainly think the old patterns of behaviour stay cryogenically present until we reach a new threshold, one that the new adopted neural connections have not been conditioned enough to cope with.  That’s  why, even after years of abstinence, something crappy happens to us and we jump back onto our old train tracks of behaviour for express relief!

However yesterday at work I queried something that had been bothering me about a building that can be seen from the window of our workspace.

It appeared to me that the first three quarters of the building was almost covered in, for want of a better term, cladding rather than glass. Then on top of that it looked like a glass viewing area which again was preceded by more cladding.

Firstly I did not know what the constructive material was instead of the usual ‘glass’ that had been used, and most importantly why it had been deemed a viable idea to have such a small inhabitable area to live or work in for such a large building.

At first my friend looked bemusingly at me , waiting for a wry grin that showed I was attempting to lure him in to a game of ‘state the obvious answer’ to then ridicule him for doing so.

When he realised I was being genuine he matter of factly said ‘it’s all glass, but what you see is just the reflection of the other building on the glass. I know this because I saw it from a different position a few days ago’.

As soon as he told me, I saw it straight away!

Like being shown an optical illusion, I could still see my old interpretation, but only as an illusion and not as the truth.

(You can see here from this different angle/perspective that I investigated from, that the reflection has changed and its obvious what’s happening.)

How poignant is that, especially for those of us living in London at the moment with the recent tragedy this week at Westminister and the very subjective opinions strewn around, not least by the media and on social networks.

My friend saw it ‘as it was’ because he saw it from a different position’.

And to highlight that even more, prior to him explaining it, a few other colleagues, who also as unaware as I was of ‘the truth’ about this buildings lack of glass, had gathered and offered different opinions for what the building was clad in.

And had my friend not been there, we probably would have adopted the most plausible explanations, passing it on to the next person who asked, rather than perhaps actually walking over to the building and finding out what was really going on! 

We all sometimes need ‘new eyes’ on how we see and interpret the world. 

How we see the world isn’t how it actually is, but rather, ‘how we are are’

What we think we see ‘out there’ are reflections of our own thoughts, beliefs, bias etc not how it ‘really is’. And that’s being human.

What is also human is that we are sometimes afraid to say what we think, whether it’s our opinion on what we have seen or felt in certain situations in a fear of looking stupid or judged, especially in today’s PC trolling fear driven society.

But in order to change, and to see another view point, or to understand how things really are, rather than simply as we interpret them, it’s imperative we have the courage to voice our opinion. 

Not in ignorance or defiant arrogance, but in terms of open minded enquiry and a willingness to learn. 

And in the real world, of course there will be those who will ridicule you, oppose and abuse you for how your current perspective or lack of knowledge.

Change takes tenacity, resilience and courage and it’s easier to follow the crowd and be accepted. That’s also normal human behaviour and all for good reason.

But if we perceiver and hold firm, the intelligent and informed ones among us will not judge, or more accurately probably…definitely will judge us, but instead of being a prick about it, will find ways to enlighten and educate us to perhaps, (and not always) a better truth and way of seeing the world.

We should always attempt to keep an open mind that perhaps, dare I say it, we could be wrong, despite how hard that may be for all of us to acknowledge, and even though the new way off seeing things may not be a totally objective view point, it may well be a more constructive way of perceiving the world around us.