Perspectives

How we look at the world depends largely on our particular perspective. Just as an object, for instance a chair, will look differently whether we look at it from the front or the back or the side or the top or the bottom, our perception of a particular event will differ depending on our age, our personal experience, our cultural background, our values, and many other things.

Since we are used to seeing and evaluating the world from our own perspective, it is often difficult for us, when we interact with others, to understand that their perspective may be very different from ours, and that their perception of an event may therefore differ completely from our own.

Please choose a text, such as a newspaper article or a story or a poem - and try to retell the "facts" mentioned there from two diametrically opposed perspectives. Please try to imagine you are "in" both perspectives - first in one, and then in the other - and retell the facts the way they make sense to you when you look at them through the eyes of that particular viewer.

Feel free to give the characters connected with these perspectives individual features and even a very unique, individual style, and to add plausible motivations and reasons for the interpretations in question.

Please also feel free to apply these exercise to real life situations - in particular when you are confronted with a view that doesn't make much sense to you.

Gudrun