“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”.- Wayne Dyer

“Sometimes a change of perspective is all it takes to see the light”.  – Dan Brown

The other day I looked at a flower from the underneath, looking upwards at it.  I usually observe flowers from looking down, taking in the centre and the petals and then smelling them and enjoying looking at the stamens.

By looking at the flower this way I could see how the petals sprung out from the base of the flower and how they were uniformly interlinked with each other and I was able to marvel at the magnificence of this.

By changing the way that I observed the flower it looked completely different to me. 

By observing the flower this way I also noticed that the background changed. The sky was in the background making a beautiful blue and white cloud background instead of the usually green of the grass.  It added a new depth to the flower and the blue and white against the pink of the flower was softening upon my eyes.

There was a small spider sitting on one of the petals with its intricate web weaving itself around some of the petals.  Something that I would have missed if I had of looked at it from my usual perspective of above only. 

This got me to thinking about how we observe everything in our lives. 

Is there an automatic way that we do things, look at things, take things in?  Do we check things out from different angles or do we just look at them directly from our eye’s level and make up our minds about what we are looking at based on this one point of view.

This goes much deeper than observing a flower.  when we expand this out From a different perspective we can see how we do this in so many areas in our lives.  Isn’t nature a great teacher?

So, the next time you go out in nature maybe you could look at things from a different perspective.  Get down on your hands and knees and crawl underneath things observing the things that you may not have noticed before. 

You may be surprised by how different things look when you change your perspective. 

What can we do to change our perspective:

• be open with child-like wonder to looking at everything from a different angle

• Sit with the tension that may arise from looking at things from this perspective

• have fun looking at things differently, fully observing the changes you see and appreciate the changes

• Expand on the infinite depth and angles and ponder with amazement at what may appear, then go deeper still!