When perspective Becomes Identity

‘Does fish know what water is?’

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I wish I were that clever and insightful as to have come up with that question.

I’m not.

The internet was unable to disentangle the mystery as to who was the very first person to pose this question/metaphor. Some sources mention David Foster Wallace, some others – John Culkin who, reportedly, said: ‘We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t the fish.’

Whoever it was, they were trying to bring home the idea that the most obvious realities are often the hardest to see.

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Temporarily relaxing our commitment to a particular – our – perspective does not require that we let go of, or denounce, our perspective. The only thing that this temporary relaxing does is allow us to temporarily entertain the possibility of a different perspective. With no commitment to it. And once we entertained it, if it does not resonate, we are free to send it on its way and return to the perspective we’ve been holding. Or, if the alternative resonates in part, we can choose to incorporate it into our existing perspective. Or, if it resonates so deeply that we cannot unsee it, we can choose to shift our perspective.
The point is that we are in full power to continue exercising our agency and sovereignty by choosing.

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From my observations and my personal experience – which I continue to experience as I am a human having a humanly experience for as long as I am alive – people often resist to temporarily relaxing their perspective. Less because they aren’t curious and more because we grew up in a culture where refusal to commit to any one perspective have been made out to be a weakness. Somehow it all happened to turn upside down where sometimes choosing to entertain perspectives from the top of the fence has become equated to a lack of character. And when we allow* that cultural notion to put us in situations where our perspective becomes part of our identity, at best, temporarily relaxing our commitment to our perspective so that we can entertain another perspective with no attachment feels shameful and, at worst, should the new perspective turn out to resonate more than the one we’ve been committed to all our lives, it can feel identity shattering.

(*I say ‘allow’ purely for the functionality of the word in this context; ‘allow’ carries with it a suggestion that we have a say in something; that we have agency to exercise the choice between ‘allow’ and ‘disallow. In reality, I believe that we ‘allow’ less than we are ‘subjected to developing’ in a specific cultural context. Revisiting the quote at the beginning of this piece, ‘Does fish know what water is?’)

So the danger is real because a shattered sense of identity is one of the hardest things to gather back together. I would never recommend practicing or taking on anything that would increase the possibility of that happening without first having mindfully practiced to sit with uncertainty and, just as importantly, sit with questions that no one has satisfactory answers to, and without having mindfully and intentionally arranged for professional support or, better yet, support network in their communities.

However, sometimes the perspective we’ve held all of our lives no longer serves us. Or, worse yet, makes us unhappy and impedes us from growing and expanding and maybe becoming happier and more content.

To try and illustrate this somewhat abstract term, an example of a perspective:

‘No one does anything for anyone without wanting something back sometime.’

It’s a very prevalent perspective in the collective West. I, too, have rejected offered help because I didn’t want to feel like I owed something to someone. But is it always true? How many times, say, out of 10, someone really has a hidden agenda, and how many times is the offer truly genuine, simply because that person who offered has the know-how or the resources or whatever? I’m not as naïve as to think that agenda-driven help offering does not happen, but is it truly a rule without exceptions?

The alternative perspective could be something like ‘SOMETIMES people offer to help because they can and without keeping a debt tab.’ That ‘sometimes’ allows for both options, that someone may want something back while another may not.

How much honest a conversation would we be having and how much more clarity would we be walking around with if we normalised talking about these things and asking outright if the offered help is transactional or simply help? Maybe not in those words; I do not recommend asking someone ‘Is this a transaction/investment in the future to offer me help today?’ Few are hardened enough for such bluntness. But I’m sure the right words may come when we need them if we only allowed for that alternative perspective.

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There are ways to learn to play with perspective taking, such as the language we use every day and without really tuning into how things come out of our mouths. I may write about it one day.

For this piece, though, I’d like to talk about another accessible way – in our daily lives – to practice ‘perspective altering’.

The relational space.

We are inherently wired to exist in relation to everything and everyone around us, so it’s a good space to practice in.

How often do we enter into conversation, be it at work or at home, almost combatant, with pre-prepared answers and positions to anticipated questions? And then we fail to hear what is truly being said because we’re busy in our heads keeping tab of our own position and the re-running in our minds the pre-prepared script while the other person is talking. And then miscommunication just happens, again.

What if we entered that same space, that same conversation, having practiced not our arguments and scrips, but, instead, the bringing to the forefront of the awareness that preparedness and openness to hear the perspective of another person does not automatically mean that we are giving up our own perspective?
And, once we’ve listened or looked at the perspective of another person, depending on the degree of resonance, we can choose to either adopt it ourselves, partly integrate it into our existing perspective or to stay with our originally held perspective.

What’s the worst that can happen?

We’d become better informed.

We’d have more choice because we are better informed.

Our relationships would become better because another person would actually feel heard and seen.

And we’d become better equipped for the deeper, more fundamental perspective taking. And maybe we’d even find ourselves that, while practicing perspective alternating in the everyday contexts, we’ve built around us a safe community who can hold space for those more reality shattering perspective shifts that sometimes come along unexpectedly and uninvited. But come they do.

We might as well prepare for those shifts intentionally and in advance.

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I cannot see any downsides of it.

But I am open to a hearing a different perspective.

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‘If you don’t go into metaphysics, you assume an uncritical metaphysics.’ – A. N. Whitehead

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