Written by: Rana Khaled Awwad
Edited by: Mona Timor Shehata
Published by: Amira Haytham
The fault is visualizing these powerful variations and differences as a curse only because we have different perspectives. Differences in abilities, thoughts, education, colour, religions, personalities and ideologies constitute a powerful society with wide variety because of one thing: Based on our differences, we tend to have extremely different perspectives.
This concept means that together we can see each single aspect of the world. If I can see only part of the world because it matches and captivates my way of thinking, I will lack visualization of the other part, but then comes another person, with different thoughts, ideologies and different perspective compensates the part I lack, and that is how we communicate and integrate each others. Because we are different.
For instance: take a look at the following picture and form your own perspective.
Group A: You visualize the image as a young beautiful lady with black fur, black intense hair and a scarf.
Group B: You witness a very old woman with big nose and sharp chin.
Both groups may still lack this idea: Why the woman looks like an old or young lady? Or how could she possibly look of different age!
The answer is: Both of you are right! It is an optical illusion for two women looking different ages: you will not know unless you visualize the picture from the same perspective your opponent looked from to know why he has a different opinion than yours about the same picture or subject.
If you belong to group A: Try to see young lady’s nickels as thin lips, her ears as eyes, and her entire face as a nose! Now does she look like an old lady?
If you belong to group B: Try to see the woman’s lips as nickels, her eyes as ears, and her nose as a small beautiful face. Does this perspective work?
Your differences over the same subject or picture does not make any of you wrong; both of you are right. You are just different; you see from different angles; you have different perspectives.
Stephan Covey mentioned a short story in his book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” that may help delivering the moral of this article: A man sitting at the bus station waiting for the bus to come while drinking his coffee. After a short period when he was only half-way done with his coffee, a father with his kids showed up and sat beside him. The father remained silent while his kids were playing, violently. They caused distraction for the man and disrupted his inner peace by playing aggressively and even spoiling his coffee! All of that happened and their father remained silent, not taking any action or even rebuking them.
The man got irritated and started to direct his anger to the father: “Can’t you be responsible enough to control your kids and take them away! Why don’t you leave!” Until the father responded simply: “I am sorry.. my wife – their mother – just died today and they still can’t handle it normally.” In this moment, and in a blink of an eye, the perspective changed upside down: From anger to sympathy, from irritation to sorrow, and from aggression to regret.
I have a personal experience of having an internship abroad and I was the only Muslim female among my team, which included all the categories: Muslims, Christians, black, and white, from Europe, Africa and the Middle East. We remained disconnected for almost the first week because of my Islamic appearance; wearing a veil. And after more days, we started communicating and discovering our real personalities, because we were almost living together for one month. After almost two weeks, one of my French teammates asked me questions she had in her mind about veil and Islam, and I satisfactorily filled in the blanks and erased any misconceptions she had about me, or at least my religion. And I cannot deny that unfortunately a lot of people have this misconception, only because they wanted to force her and other people to look from their aggressive perspective without much consideration to that of others. That was when we communicated.
It happens to us every single time daily when we truly heed to the opposite side of the story, the part that is dark in our eyes, what we do not see, only then we may start seeing things differently. The world is not supposed to be the same, we are not the same; we are not even the same as we used to be.
We are different from the ones we were yesterday, and the day before, and 10 years before, even though we are the same people, same bodies, same life, but we do not see life the same, we see it from a different angle. That is why we share the same world, but have different languages, skin colour, religions, cultures, and ideologies. Consequently, we will never communicate or understand these differences unless we see from the point the other one witnesses the world from. Only then you can form a real image, from all sides not just one-sided, and then communication happens. Not only in the name of professionalism, but also humanity. Therefore, in order to see something different, admit that there is a difference and heed to it.