Poetry and Perspective

Have you ever noticed how hard it can be to see something from someone else's perspective? Sometimes, it is almost frustratingly impossible.

I have this general image of myself as an understanding and empathetic person and yet, there are some things I just don't get.

There are also things that I find very hard to explain to certain kinds of people.

While we tend to distinguish between these two processes - understanding someone else’s view and explaining something to them - for me, they are sort of the same.

If I want to explain something to someone, I can't just explain it the way I see it. Sure, sometimes it goes right, but more often than not, the way I explain it will mirror the way I see it. The problem then being, of course, that that explanation doesn't work for the other party.

After all, if they saw things the same way I did, I would not have to explain anything in the first place.

To get my point across, I have to understand where the other person is coming from. I need to know what the gaps and turnarounds in their thought process are. Where do we diverge? Where exactly is it getting hard for them to follow me?

For me, this is especially difficult when I am trying to explain how I feel about certain things. Feelings are very personal and they can happen in very different ways for different people. Moreover, we rarely take the time to articulate our feelings so we are probably also lacking practice in putting them into words. And to top it all off, feelings are invisible. They happen somewhere inside us. Sure, we can express them with our face and body language, but that knowledge is always second-hand.

That's one of the reasons I like poetry so much. To me, poetry is the written expression of a feeling, a moment or a thought. All of it put into words onto a page. I like writing poems because I like finding ways to help you see what I see. To share my perspective, if even for a moment.