Perspective

Today I spent some time sanding an old trailer.  I took the boat off to give more space and better access to the areas that needed attention.  I used a wire wheel attached to a drill to remove rust and chipping paint.  It was easy to get the tops and sides, but more difficult to get to the underside.  I found myself lying on the ground next to the trailer and working on the bottom, holding the drill above me.  At the time I thought it was a hassle.  But for some reason I just accepted it as the way it was.  It wasn’t until later that it finally hit me that I could very easily flip it over for convenience sake.

The reason it took me so long to think of flipping the trailer over was because of perspective.  More specifically it was my static, narrow perspective that held me to a single way of thinking.  With more dynamic perspective I would have come to my conclusion sooner. 

The first thing that I did as I started the project was to remove the boat.  At that point it was just trailer.  And to go one step further, it wasn’t hooked up to anything and it wasn’t being pulled anywhere, so it wasn’t a trailer.  It was just a piece of rusted metal with wheels (but those eventually came off too).  If I had seen it as simply a piece of metal it would have been easier to break out of the idea that it had a under-side and a top-side.  Of course it needs to be oriented a certain way when it is hauling a boat, but beyond that it doesn’t.

Of course it still is a boat trailer even when it’s not attached to a vehicle to pull it and when it doesn’t have a boat on it. The problem was how I saw it.

I am a writer.  Which isn’t to say that I am always writing, or that I am a writer only when I am actually putting words together in a way to express something.  Like the trailer it is the way I am built that makes me what I am.  My experience with the trailer made me wonder if I am the same way when I write.  Do I get caught in the rut of thinking that my way of telling a story is the only one?

Stories are never really one sided.  They can be told from the vantage of the characters or they can be told by a narrator.  Either way there may be a degree of lopsidedness that comes from limited perspective.

It makes me curious.  I want to read the other side of stories.  Books often have the protagonist and antagonist, the good guy and the bad guy.  But that qualification has more to do with vantage point than with objective universal right and wrong.  The bad guy has a story too.  I suspect that in his version he is good.  It’s just that we are rooting for the other guy.  We root for our favorite sports team but the other team isn’t intrinsically bad because of it.

One story I would like to read from the bad guy perspective is The Poisonwood Bible.   As the reader I found my side.  I found it easy to blame and accuse the father while forgiving and vindicating his family.  Perhaps I was too hasty.  Perhaps I was stuck in my perspective.  Maybe I saw a man in the same way I saw a trailer, from a narrow vantage point.