Appreciating Nature's Art: Musings About Looking at Different Perspectives

Life is about what you make of it. We live in a strange era in which you can be anything yet people are so religious today in terms of following others. We are free to be whoever we are, yet we sit glued stuck to our screens viewing other people's lives and trying to copy them. I think this is mostly because we have lost the art of seeing things from various perspectives, and not just one narrow viewpoint.

I bend down to see these flowers and as I begin to take photographs of them, I see that the photographs get more beautiful as I take them from different perspectives. Normally, one would look at all and choose the best one. Is this not how our lives also work? We gather data from various sources and choose the best. But what if this way of going about is wrong? What if this way of doing this actually limits our viewpoint...

Life is such that you can always see it from various perspectives. People are so used to there being "one right way" that they forfeit the opportunity to see things from multiple viewpoints. There is an old saying that when you blindfold ten people and let them feel an elephant you will get ten different answers to what it is. One single perspective can never get to the "overall" picture.

Yet, one should never think that you can actually get to that "objective" perspective. Because that objective view (i) is also just a viewpoint and (ii) what does it actually say to be objective? It is a rather useless concept. Think about it. How can you say anything objective? How can you escape your body, your spatial-temporal experience, and claim that something is XYZ without any of these influences? Objectivity is a myth.

The view from nowhere, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel says, is just that, a view from nowhere. It is a mythical place that we think we can enter because "my group has it right". Yet, we are just one of those ten blindfolded people touching the elephant, thinking we know the bigger picture.

All of this is from just taking a picture of a flower. But is nature not the best teacher? Can we not learn so much from nature? Are we not just these small ants walking around trying to figure out what we are feeling without senses? Why has it come to this that a large portion of humanity tries to cut off their "human-ness", their subjective experiences as humans? Why is it that those people also want to make their viewpoint the universal one, forcing others to conform? Strange times we live in because various people fall for that.

Are we not these small flowers, trying to make sense of all of this around us? Trying to feel and declare what we see. But how impoverished is life not when we declare our group to be the group shunning the rest to the periphery? We can lead such colorful diverse lives, yet we choose conformity, sameness...

I look at the sky and wonder how much more colorful life would have been if sameness was frowned upon. How much more colorful would our diets have been if we did not crave the croissant or bread made from wheat that is now a monoculture taking up so much land? How more colorful would life not have been if we did not crave that banana that is grown in an even more expansive monoculture? How more colorful if everyone did not crave that iPhone, that lager beer, that college degree...

Modern people are addicted to sameness, to what the other have.

If we can only understand, that seeing from different perspectives can grow diversity.

I hope you enjoyed the musings and the photographs. All of the photographs were taken with my Nikon D300 and the musings are my own. Stay safe, keep on questioning.