Anyone who grew up during the 80’s will remember the line from the Miller Lite marketing piece with Bob Uecker.  Uecker was in the box seats and going on about how great it is to be well-known because you’re given the best seats in the house.  An usher comes up and announces that he’s in the wrong seat when Bob gives his famous line “Oh, I must be in the front row!”  The next shot is Bob in the nosebleeds with just one or two other people.  The great thing is that he still turns to his seat mate and says “Great seats, eh buddy?”.  The exact same line he gave to the guys in the box seats.

I’m a huge fan of aging, considering the alternative is death.  To me, one of the greatest benefits of aging is the experience gained from simply living through things, be it wonderful happy events, or scares like Acid Rain and Killer Bees.  Aging allows us to have perspective.

Take the example above; When I was growing up, the headlines screamed the terrors of acid rain and every bee in the garden was a potential death sentence as killer bees were on the rampage, or so we were led to believe.  Turns out, after a few years the threat of acid rain just sort of vanished, along with the killer bees, and were not so quietly replaced with global warming, climate change, melting glaciers, rising seas, unprecedented wildfires, inexplicable heat waves, and record cold temps.  Make no mistake, I am by no means a climate change denier. We as caretakers of this planet, can clearly do better in tending to Mother Earth.  However, after having lived through a variety of gloom and doom scenarios, wars, African killer bees, acid rain,  SARS, EBOLA, BIRD Flu, AIDs, and most recently COVID-19, etc.. etc..I have a different perspective on how troublesome things really are.  In fact, living through various tragedies and difficulties has helped me to realize, it’s not the end of the world, and likely will not be for a long time to come.

The beautiful thing about the aging process is having all of the experiences and memories of not only yourself but your contemporary cohorts, to draw upon to make sense of the current reality.  Because honestly?  Nothing really changes.  We have the same issues today that we had 50 or 100 or probably 1000 years ago.  People and society don’t really change all that much.  The issues that divide us may change a bit, but in reality, we as humans have been doing the same thing for centuries;  Just trying to happily eke out a life for ourselves and not kill each other or the planet, in the process.  Allowing ourselves to remember not only where we’ve come from but what our ancestors have gone through, allows us to move forward and deal with the regurgitated issues that inevitably arise for every generation.

It reminds me of a great scene from the movie Ratatouille when the dreaded food critic, Anton Ego, enters Gaston’s and requests a special meal of “Perspective”.

I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of why perspective is so important to harness and why being willing to accept multiple perspectives is the key to a successful and happy life.

There’s loads of information online that speaks to the study of perspective in the field of psychology.  Being a Psych major myself, many many moons ago, this is likely why I find this so fascinating. (and why a few of my blog posts have become more like research papers.  I’m a perpetual student of learning and I love it!)

I’ll end with a quote I found that really resonated with me:

“Your perspective will become either your prison or your passport”

– Steven Furtick