Jacob Held Quote on Perspective and How What We See Is A Reflection of Who We Are

“We can’t change what life is, but we can change how we react to and interpret it.”

Jacob Held

Beyond the Quote (148/365)

To start, a story of two dogs. Both at separate times walk into the same room. One comes out wagging his tail while the other comes out growling. A woman watching this goes into the room to see what could possibly make one dog so happy and the other so mad. To her surprise she finds a room filled with mirrors. The happy dog found a thousand happy dogs looking back at him while the angry dog saw only angry dogs growling back at him. What you see in the world around you is a reflection of who you are.

My sister’s dog, Mako, is the happy dog who always sees thousands of other happy dogs looking back at him. He goes for walks, hikes, and adventures to dog parks and makes countless friends, plays endless games, and has unimaginable amounts of fun. Mako sees a world full of friends.

My dog, Stella, is the dog who you will always find growling at any other dog that looks back at her. She goes for walks and barks endlessly at other dogs on the street. She goes on hikes and tugs and yanks on the leash as she aggressively makes her statement towards any other dog that shares her path. She can’t even go to the dog park or doggy day care because she only sees a world full of enemies and can’t handle it.

Same world of dogs. Two totally different perspectives. What accounts for this drastic difference in perspective towards other dogs is hard to know for sure, but my instinct tells me that nurture has a lot to do with it. Some dogs are certainly born more aggressive than others, but how they were raised, in my estimation, has a profound effect on how they act. I rescued Stella when she was around 5 years old and my guess is that she was trained to be a fighting dog, but then was abandoned because she couldn’t go through with it. Again, it’s impossible to know for sure. But, with that type of upbringing, it’s no wonder she sees a world full of enemies.

Stella is a wonderfully sweet natured dog and loves people. When she sees people she only sees friends and potential belly scratchers, like Mako. But, how she sees her own kind is wildly distorted. If I had a way of communicating with her I would sit her down and help her try to unpack and work through some of those early traumatic experiences so as to better understand (and maybe reform) her belief structure. Because one thing I know for sure is that the world may be filled with awful news, troubling events, and evil people—but it is not filled ONLY with that. The world is NOT all bad, NOT all awful, and NOT all evil. The world is, in my firm belief, filled with WAY more of the exact opposite. I see a world filled with more good than evil, more strength than weakness, and more friends than enemies.

This is not to say that when we see hate, evil, wrongdoing, or malevolence that we should only look for the good—that’s not what I’m saying. What I am saying though, is that when we only see a world full of enemies, we can only ever bark by ourselves. But, when we see a world full of potential friends and allies, we can form connections and bonds over our visions for a better future. Alone we are weak. Together we are strong. If everyone is an enemy, we will remain alone. If we start to see and believe more in the best in what people are capable of, we can unite together. And together is how we win a war of hate, evil, wrongdoing, and malevolence. But we have to change how we see the world before we can change the world that we see. It starts with us.

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