I am fascinated by animal behavior and love observing their actions.  It makes me pay better attention to my world.

How different their world is to ours.  Yesterday I took my two dogs out for a walk.  It was around 5pm, so still light.  We went to my bank on the corner to deposit a check and then proceeded to walk our usual route, just in reverse.  The girls are now 6 yrs old and we’ve been walking this route for almost as many years, so you’d think they’d be their normal semi-confident selves.  Nope, they were very tentative, ears about as far forward as they can get but tails low instead of high, walking behind my knee line instead of wanting to be a step ahead. Not until the very last minute, when we reached our front yard, did they seem to say “Oh, OK, this place I know!”

I’ve learned that what they see is all the details, no panoramic stuff at all.  Although we’ve walked the exact same circuit clockwise many, many times, they don’t know that and even if they did, today we’re going anti-clockwise, so brand new ballgame right.  And as their vocabulary doesn’t stretch as far as ‘remember, reverse or perspective, let alone clockwise and anti-clockwise’ I can’t tell them either.

But see, even as erect homo sapiens, if you look West from one end of your street, then walk to the other end, turn around and look East, yes, of course it’s completely different.  But yet it’s the same street.  Why?  Because we’ve been up and down it, this way and that way, yes, but we also remember it, we took a snapshot of the big picture.  Simply we know.

Perspective, then, is really about the knowing, not the seeing?

P.S. I am participating in the Ultimate Blog Challenge this month – 31 days of July, a blog a day if I can.