Different People Present Different Perspectives

Perspective is something unique to everyone’s personality. Some people decide to look at the bright side of things, while other look at the bad side. I guess it depends on your attitude towards life. If you are the type of person that loves living everyday to the fullest or maybe the type of person that does not stress too much over things, you’ll probably find yourself thinking positive most of the time. Now, if you’re the type of person that gets mad easily or worries too much about things, you might see things another way.

In the short part we read of On Looking by Alexandra Holowits, we see how this woman decides to pay attention to everything around her while she took a walk. It was impressive the amount of detail that she presented to the reader, but it helped to imagine what she was looking at. Although we didn’t read the rest of the script were different perspective were to be exposed of different people, I can already imagine what was going to happen. Recently, two female students in the Social Department of the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus interviewed me as a class project. The interview was about the condition of ADHD and the purpose of the interview was precisely to capture different perspectives on what it was or what people understood it was. As a student from Natural Sciences, my response was that ADHD is a mental disorder were people can get distracted very easily and are constantly hyperactive due to their lack of control, neurologically speaking. Immediately, the two females looked at me and said: “That was one of the most elaborate answers we have heard. People usually just say: well it says it in the name, attention deficit disorder (leaving out hyperactivity) or they say its just a kid that is super hyper”. For me, my answer was just what I have constantly heard in my groups and/or in my classes, but for people coming from other majors that was a totally different perspective.

I think that besides the fact that all of us have different perspectives and that these in fact are due to our different experiences in life, what we can really extract from On Looking is a desire to pay more attention to what happens around us. We live each day thinking it’s just another day when in reality it’s so much more. Have you ever heard of Carpe diem? It means, “Seize the day” in Latin. Isn’t that motivating? Seize the day! I think it’s telling us to live everyday to the fullest and find happiness in everything that surrounds us, in our friends, in our family, in our job, on the street while we walk or in our cars when we drive. Wherever we are, pay attention, what happens today may not happen again tomorrow.