I like Queen for many reasons. One of those being when Freddie Mercury sings about looking in the mirror and crying when he’s searching for someone to love. Mirrors are everywhere and they provide a vital service to humans: perspective.
When you are at a bar and you realize how stupid you are for coming to a stupid place like a bar, you become pissed off. And who better to take out this anger over your own choices out on than those who staff that awful establishment? So, as you become irate you go to the bar where the staff is but instead of coming face to face with an epitome of pretense and poor choices you see yourself in the mirror that literally every bar has above the liquor bottles. And you move on, because life is a marathon and not a sprint.
I am not preaching a turn-the-other-cheek sort of philosophy in life, because while everything is surmountable if you actually try, sometimes it’s just more satisfying to do the opposite. Sometimes.
That’s why I love perspective, it makes everything more easily understood. A lot of times I’ve found myself confused at how to proceed, I look at the decisions I’ve made which led to this point, this circumstance. I then see how many things outside of my control needed to happen, those completely out of my control. If the former outweigh the latter I move on because why waste time being angry at something you caused? I’ll never understand or accept any other reaction.
But, if you are forced into something that makes your own life or some aspect of it unbearable then you should change that.
I see life as a series of things we encounter, forks in the road, and the only stopping you should do is when you die or else life becomes boring.
So at these forks, it’s in your best interest to make a decision and accept the decision’s consequences, this is perspective for me. It allows you to remove yourself from life for a second so that when you re-engage you will be better prepared to ensure whatever it is that you hope to have in life.
It takes emotion out of decisions that don’t necessitate anything beyond reasonable thought. But, there comes a time when a part of you cannot be removed from the equation because some one or some other thing has made the fork you now face about that intrinsic part of you.
In these latter cases, the besr reaction is to confront issue, once again, to see if the other person’s right. But, and I cannot stress this enough, you must evaluate what you are being told and taught so that you can know what you think.
There’s a big difference between thinking for oneself and thinking within some one else’s way of thinking.
Clay
Clayton Tomlinson 