My Two-Cents: Beer, Starfish, & Perspective
One of my favorite things in the entirety of my existence is phone calls with my long-distance friends. Being a recovering yappaholic, I often relapse into my vice from time to time – the telephone line. There are many negatives and unintended (and intended) consequences of cell phones. But the ability to chat with friends across the country is a definite positive. And one I’m extremely grateful for, given that many of my dear friends are scattered across the country. Recently, after one of these yap sessions with a friend, I settled on a topic I wanted to share: perspective.
Everything that we do is shaped by the common denominator of perspective. It shapes how we see things and how we feel. I could go on and on, but I’d probably bore you with a bunch of semantics – so instead I opt for choice B, where I explain what I mean through parables.
A couple of months ago at school, I was particularly preoccupied with the polarizing negatives and frustrating inefficiencies in the world. My bench mate Keegan attempted to cheer me up with a wholesome story he had taken a particular inclination to while coping with similar worldly frustrations:
“Once upon a time, there was an old man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach every morning before he began his work. Early one morning, he was walking along the shore after a big storm had passed and found the vast beach littered with starfish as far as the eye could see, stretching in both directions.
Off in the distance, the old man noticed a small boy approaching. As the boy walked, he paused every so often, and as he grew closer, the man could see that he was occasionally bending down to pick up an object and throw it into the sea. The boy came closer still, and the man called out, “Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?”
The young boy paused, looked up, and replied, “Throwing starfish into the ocean. The tide has washed them up onto the beach and they can’t return to the sea by themselves,” the youth replied. “When the sun gets high, they will die, unless I throw them back into the water.”
The old man replied, “But there must be tens of thousands of starfish on this beach. I’m afraid you won’t really be able to make much of a difference.”
The boy bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it as far as he could into the ocean. Then he turned, smiled, and said, “It made a difference to that one!””
Keegan and I were both dealt the same cards, but he was able to play a completely different hand. This is a perfect example of how perspective varies. I tossed my pessimistic perspective in lieu of a much less drudgy one. And since the ball was now in my court, I called a timeout and chew on this nugget of wisdom.
We both read the same story, but the only difference was our perspective. Perhaps the takeaway from this fable was not saving the ocean, but rather deciding how I saw the ocean. A dangerous playground for sharks and deep-sea dwellers? A place to surf? Nature's cooler for my silver bullet Coors Light cans? Out of all the things in life, is perspective the one thing we can actually control? I decided to test this theory further, but this time through my own homemade fables.
Have you ever been stuck in a sandstorm? I haven’t, but it doesn’t sound fun. From my feeble-minded perspective, sandstorms seem bad. But wait! There are also mirages in sandstorms. These seem good – because in them, our perspective changes. Quite literally, we can see! But at the end of the day, you are still in a fucking sandstorm. Whomp whomp. Perspective can sometimes give delusion.
Have you ever been on a bad date? I sure have! Nothing like checking the clock and wondering when it’s socially acceptable to leave. This sucks. But this makes it all the more important to lean on perspective. One time, I went on a date with a guy in computer software. We lacked connection. I was bored and waiting for my sushi. I had two options, both determined by my choice in perspective – I could suffer through the next hour, or I could flip the narrative and entertain myself. So I asked the guy to give me a whole rundown on the potential takeover of AI. Dun dun dun! It was riveting stuff. He was passionate. He was not my soulmate. However, he was my teacher for the night in what stocks I’d be privy to invest in. Perspective allowed me to change a potential drag of a meal into a thought-provoking, financially lucrative endeavor! And a free beer, of course.
Have you ever woken up with a crippling case of hanxiety? Once in a blue moon (every Sunday) I woke up with a blithering headache and hatred for sunlight. I’m sure these symptoms have much more to do with the fact that life is hard and miserable, and much less to do with the fact that I closed down my local dive bar and claimed “one more shot” was indeed necessary. These rampant headaches and fear of light are often accompanied by a feeling some of you probably know all too well: hanxiety. All through college, I failed to develop a potent elixir to cure me of this illness. But my friend's sea turtle story struck an imaginary cord in me – I’d stumbled upon the solution, perspective. So after the vicious illness took me its damsel in distress, I fought back. I called up my friends to see if they remembered my actions. Did they remember me standing on my kitchen counter and threatening my fellow party-goers with the notion of me rapping Ice Ice Baby? (A threat that never falls flat, since a year ago, I was kicked off the stage at a Karaoke bar for butchering the Vanilla Ice hit.) Did my friends remember me following through on the aforementioned threat? (Spoiler alert: tone deaf and drunk are never a good combo.) Nope. Turns out it was less of a visceral memory and more of a translucent recall for them. They were all also too deep in Jello shots and their own hanxiety to recall my star-stumbled performance. And as that perspective set in, my hanxiety subsided.
My perspective change didn’t stop there! I wanted to know if this was truly the case in multiple scenarios. So a couple weekends ago, I sent out some drunk apologies. And later followed those drunk apologies with, “You do remember what I’m talking about, right?” Here is where I took a chance and relied on the honesty of others. I myself am a liar. So if roles were reversed, I would do just that. But it turns out others are much more candid than I am – they all admitted they had no recollection of such gauche encounters. Buddy for me! It seemed to me that it might not just be my perspective that cured my illness, but the realization that others' perspectives are very different from my own. I took this token and ran with it.
Our mindsets shape our reality. And others' lack of judgment can free us from self-imposed anxiety. Both perspectives, ours and others, can act as a leash, a lever, and a lens. The lens can be a glass: clear, translucent, or opaque. And this matters much more than whether the glass is half full or half empty. We don’t have any control over the colors of other people’s cocktail glasses. We can’t tell them what to drink. (Even though the keen ones will always opt for a Cosmo.) But we can fill our own cups, and guzzle that fucker down! Perspective is our version of throwing starfish – we can’t save them all, but we can still toss a few back. Sometimes the one we save is ourselves, from hanxiety, bad sushi dates, or karaoke disasters. So we can continue trucking along, drink in one hand and a starfish in the other.
