How To Get Along With Other People By Seeing Them Through A Different Perspective
To me, one of the hardest things about being a person is figuring out how to get along with other people.
It seems like there’s always some problem, some conflict, some battle.
It makes sense, though—we’re all walking around at the very same time with our private thoughts and our private wants and needs, our private circumstances and private memories of past circumstances.
It’s no surprise that when our paths collide, there’s going to be a conflict, either out in the open or in the privacy of our thoughts. Especially if we don’t have the skills to understand these collisions from any other perspective than our own.
When we have different sets of eyeballs on our different heads, we literally aren’t able to see the same reality from where we stand, where we've been, or where we’re headed.
So how can we get along and stop all these battles in our minds and in our homes and in our communities?
Maybe one way is to figure out how to shift our perspective, so that we can at least try to understand what life is like through another set of eyeballs than our own.
One way I like to shift my perspective, when I find myself getting upset about someone else’s behavior, is to imagine that in my mind, I have an elevator.
I can get in my elevator and see my circumstances from the ground floor, or I can take my elevator all the way up to the top floor and see my circumstances from up there.
One thing I’ve noticed, on all my trips up and down in my elevator, is that most of my upsets occur on the ground floor of life, where all the traffic is.
I think this is because it’s so chaotic down there and difficult to see that we’re all in the traffic together.
Instead, on the ground floor, it feels like I’m all alone down there, trying so hard to get through obstacle after obstacle that all these other people keep creating.
But if I take the elevator in my mind all the way to the top floor, things looks very different.
It’s much easier from up here to see that we’re all coming from somewhere and trying our best to get through various kinds of traffic to some destination, with enough or not enough fuel in our tanks. And sometimes, the stress is too much, and people blow their horn.
When I’m on the ground floor and I get beeped at, it’s very unpleasant. I feel disappointed and anxious.
But if I pause and take the elevator of my perspective up to the top floor and see the situation from up here, I suddenly feel a lot more calm.
The top floor feels much less stressful than down there in all that traffic. It’s quieter, less triggering.
That’s because from up here, I’m no longer in all that traffic.
From up here, I have more space to notice what’s really happening down there—that everyone is trying to get where they’re going at the same time—and that sometimes there are red lights and sometimes vehicles get in each other’s way, and sometimes vehicles aren’t even paying attention to one other.
From up on the top floor, I can also see that some people blow their horn to prevent accidents, while others blow their horn simply because they’re having a difficult time coping with the stress of being surrounded by so many other vehicles who don’t seem to understand or care where they’ve been, or where they’re trying to get to.
When I pay attention to the traffic of life from a top floor perspective, I have a much easier time understanding that when someone is beeping at me, it doesn’t mean anything about the value of who I am.
It only means that where I happen to be in the traffic of life is inadvertently triggering the person, for reasons I may never fully understand.
Maybe the person who’s beeping has been stuck in some kind of traffic or another for 30 years.
Maybe they took a wrong turn and now they’re lost.
Maybe they’re panicked because they’re running late to an opportunity they’ve been waiting for.
Or maybe they’re not feeling well and have no one to call for the kind of support they really need.
From the top floor, I have the space to consider so many more possibilities for what could be happening then I can when I’m down on the ground floor.
On the ground floor what I mostly see is that there’s a lot of jerks and that they all have a special talent for ruining my day.
But from the top floor, I can begin to notice that many beepers have been beeping long before my vehicle came along, and I can also notice instances where I have been unintentionally creating more chaos by not making enough room for others to easily pass, because I’m too busy trying to get to where I’m going first.
When I practice seeing things from a top floor perspective, I have a much easier time understanding that other people’s behavior has very little to do with me.
And with this understanding, when I return to the ground floor and someone beeps at me, instead of beeping back, I can remember what I saw from the top floor, and practice being a little more patient and maybe a little more empathetic, knowing that we’re all stuck in different kinds of jams in different kinds of vehicles at the very same time.
For peace to exist in our minds, and in our homes and communities, we need to be willing to be flexible enough to see our situations differently—to see the traffic of life not only as something that’s happening to us alone, but something that’s happening to all of us, together.
We have to be willing to recognize that even though life is different through every set of eyeballs, what we all seem to have in common is the desire to be valued and treated fairly in the traffic of life.
And when we feel valued, we’re much more likely to slow down a little and relax, because to feel valued is to feel like we belong where we are in our lives, and when we feel like we belong, we might not feel as desperate to rush around, and run into each other, while trying so hard to get to someplace better.
-JLK
All episodes written, performed and produced by Jessica Laurel Kane, and the music was made by Jerome Rossen at Freshmade Music.