The truth is there are a thousand shades of gray, blue, pink, you name it, you have choices, just go to Home Depot and try asking for gray. I haven’t read the book but I’ve been told about its content, given what I know, I’m not headed that way with this post. Perspectives, this is what I’m going to write about. My husband always says that the way you choose to look at things that happen in life determines what type of result you will go through in that given situation. I also recently read the same kind of message from a book my father in law gave me for Christmas,  Life’s Greatest Lessons: 20 Things That Matter by Hal Urban, teacher turned writer. I’m not finished with the book yet but he does make some very interesting points on the way you choose to look at things and how those decisions lead you, in essence, to better or worse.

I completely understand this concept, it’s like Friedrich Nietzsche’s argument on truth, there is no truth since its based on a perspective, so you can technically say there is no truth outside of a perspective. Ok, so before I go into an in depth study of Nietzsche (flashbacks of my Rhetoric classes as an undergrad at Berkeley) I will get on with it. Today I was told I was choosing to see a certain situation at its worse, this coming from my positive outlook on life husband. After I hung up the phone, I thought really hard about it, I even dreamed about it and then the light bulb came on, he was wrong in this situation and so was Hal Urban. Well maybe not completely wrong, but I’ll explain.

What is to say that something truly negative happens, yes you can still look at it from a positive perspective (lessons learned, what not to do again, what to do differently in the future…I get it) but does that then make the antagonist’s actions forgotten, simply overlooked, forgiven…you should forgive when possible, by all means I’m all for it, but I feel as though in my situation the antagonist is getting a jail free card and somehow I’m the one feeling bad about it now! Something isn’t right.

To clarify, Urban doesn’t simply say to forget and move on, but that’s what my husband told me to do and though I initially thought he was right, he is wrong. The actions committed (they aren’t serious by any means but I felt light should be shed on the issue) were still insensitive and the antagonist should take responsibility instead of trying to turn the tables and make the victim feel as if her feelings are unjustified.

So there, I’ve said my peace and I hope my husband can see it too.