Perspectives. This word has been rattling around in my head the last several weeks. On a recent excursion to visit in-laws and a friend in the New York area, “perspective” was a concept I repeatedly experienced over the whole of the long weekend.
In New York, exploring other perspectives is incredibly easy. Despite the two photos I took of the skyline at night, and the new interior of the World Trade Center Path station, not everything there is black and white. It is every shade of grey–from the sidewalks to the skyscrapers–and every shade of beige, as evidenced in the faces and façades.
But seeing another perspective is also easy to ignore. New Yorkers, heads down, rush between subway stops, and dart between taxicabs overlooking the sign blinking “don’t walk.” Visitors and residents alike flit from café to store staring up at tall buildings or down at cell phones seeking what they want.
But as a fiction writer, I need to understand viewpoints that are not my own. Sometimes I must write of places, people or events that are disturbing, distasteful, or even pleasantly different. Travel is always a method for finding that new view, and on this trip, three aspects deepened my ability to perceive a varied view of the world.
ART. The Pixel Forest exhibition at the New Museum in Manhattan is the work of the Swiss artist, Pipilotti Rist. She combined layered video imagery, large-scale screens, and hanging lights, encouraging viewers to weave through and therefore become the art itself. The visuals displaying the artist’s perception on nature, sex and the human body was at times jarring and uncomfortable. But when I finally spent enough time letting it in, I was reminded of the saying of an old friend, “It’s only kinky the first time.”
COMEDY. Chris Gethard, an actor, comedian, has written and performs a one-man show called Career Suicide, “about depression, alcoholism, suicide, and the other funniest parts of life.” I have rarely considered those three issues to be high-comedy, but without doubt Gethard’s perspective on them is truly funny. Through laughter, he is helping both himself and his audience find a new outlook on too-often sad or silent issues.
PEOPLE. My spouse’s parents in New Jersey are very different people than I am. I’m a pasty Irish/English/Dutch gal who grew up in Canada. They are both a single generation away from Italy, and both in their 90s. On the surface it seems the only things we share are a fondness for family and a love of their son. Until the food arrives. And when we eat together, here come the stories. No matter how loud, how religious, or how foreign they might be to me, hearing of how they navigated their long lives, I can see now, we are not so different.
The result of these shifts in my perspective? Greater understanding. Compassion. Empathy. A wider view. And hopefully a better-balanced approach to seeking the truth.
Consequently if I have a wish for us as we let the old year pass, let us slow down. Let us reach out. Look up. Smile at a stranger. And let’s connect deeply with art, with comedy, with others not like us in order to hear, feel, and even taste what life is like from another perspective. Then perhaps we just might find a way to travel for words that can begin to bring us together.