Perspective

It’s all about perspective.

Consider: a cookie jar left unattended on top of a bench. A stool is dragged over. A small figure climbs atop it and reaches for the jar. They grapple with the lid, they open the lid, they steal a cookie.

Hurrah for the child who stole the cookie, we might say. Hurrah.

But to the parent who enters the room to behold their eldest teetering precipitously on the edge of a stool and reaching for a cookie–a cookie–the situation may appear different.

It’s all about perspective.

Snatch the cookie and run, little one. And of course that’s what happens. Dextrous as a monkey the child steals the cookie, leaps away before the stool falls and scampers away from the yelling parent.

Hurrah, we say. Hurrah. Nobody was hurt and a cookie was obtained.

But what if the cookie jar had fallen? Shattered glass and crumbled biscuits. Now there is no cookies for anyone.

It’s all about perspective.

What if the child had fallen? A sob, an embrace a lesson learned?

What if the child had fallen badly? A young bone snaps. The parent does not just see it happen but they hear it. Now we’re in a horror. The parent bundles up the wailing child and takes them to the hospital; the cookie jar is forgotten.

It’s all about perspective.

When the child who stole the cookie sits outside to eat it and sneers at the kid next door who doesn’t get to eat cookies much. Villain! We cry. Oh, villainous child.

But what if the cookie was shared? Broken into two at least roughly equal pieces and eaten together in secret? What a bond these children have, we’d say. What purity of spirit.

It’s all about perspective.

An ant navigates a maze of broken glass and cookie crumbs; a parent enters into a room; a kitchen stool teeters against gravity, frozen suddenly in time and used as an example in a physics textbook.

The students mull it over: how heavy is the child? How heavy is the stool? What level of surface tension does the linoleum provide? The cookie jar is forgotten. The cookie jar is not important. Is the cookie jar important?

It’s all about perspective.