I was talking last week with a high school senior who was about to enter her last season of competitive speech. As an alumnus of that same speech program, I was curious to know how the head coach was doing.
“He’s, like, never frickin’ there,” she informed me, explaining that he missed a lot of practices with students because of his health. “He should just quit. It’s pretty selfish of him to keep coaching when he can hardly do anything.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think he sees it that way,” I replied. “I bet he can’t imagine life without teaching and coaching, since he doesn’t have any family. He needs it.”
“Yeah, but the real perspective is, it’s selfish.”
Ah, the “real” perspective -- that magical, elusive, objective truth by which everything is judged.
News flash: it doesn’t exist! Whether we’re talking about people, current events, or the condition of someone’s health, there is no one “real” perspective, no one truth that we need to figure out. The truth depends on your point of view. You determine the identity of a thing by naming it, labeling it, and assigning attributes to it -- or in some cases, by accepting someone else’s ideas for those things. So why not go with something that serves you?
For example, instead of believing that the condition of your health is stuck as it is, and that it’s a bad thing, why not believe that it’s a sign that your being is experiencing incredible shifts and changes, that you’re about to crawl out of your cocoon? Just because someone else has told you something is true, or because you think it’s true, doesn’t mean that it is. Choose your own terms. You may not be able to control what is happening to you, but you have the power to define it.
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