Change of Perspective

This week I had to smile at a video I saw and shared on social media.  It was about a very small child holding a mobile phone.  I am guessing that the child is only about 12-18 months old as she is not able to pronounce proper words and talks throughout the video in gobbledigook. It is very humorous to watch how the small child carries out her 'conversation' using gestures that no doubt she copied from the adults in her life whom she had seen doing the same thing.  No doubt the toddler is very serious in what she is doing while others who are older find her actions quite funny and worth filming and sharing.  The video lasts just over a minute long and is worth seeing if you haven't already done so,.  Just click on the picture.

Often our age has a lot to do with how we view things.  Our perspective changes as we grow older.  As small children, we think our parents know everything about everything and tend to believe anything we are told.  As we grow into our teens, they obviously know nothing at all but when we ourselves become parents, we realise that they were right all along.  And so it is with many things in life.  How our concepts change depending on our age!

I had a stark reminder of this this week as yesterday I reached a milestone in my life when I celebrated the fact that I arrived on this planet 75 years ago.  I remember as a child thinking that people in their teens were quite grown up.  When I became a teenager, I looked with awe at those in their 20s while people in their 30s were getting on a bit.  There is a tendency to look upon someone of an older generation as really old until we actually reach that age.  I always felt that those in their 60s and 70s were really ancient but now that i'm 75, well it's not that old.  I mean people often live until they're well into their 90s and beyond.  (Forget the Bible verse that tells us that a person's life is three score years and ten!)  In my mind, I'm still young and active.  I just wish sometimes that my body would adopt the same perspective.

This has all been a bit tongue in cheek but on one last serious note, it is important to accept that someone can change their opinions about things without actually being a sort of traitor to their prior beliefs and thoughts.  It's just that as nature evolves with the seasons and the life flourishes and becomes something quite different from the early stages of existence, so we humans change our perspective on things as we live and learn.  It is the nature of things to evolve and we as part of creation continue evolving as we grow, learn and become aware of things in life.  As we journey, our view points vary.  We begin to see things we couldn't before.  And I'm still evolving and learning.  Well, we're never too old to live and learn.