Thoughtful Thursday: Shifting Viewpoints
The interesting thing about our physical universe is that immediate assessment of anything rarely provides a full understanding or even an accurate evaluation.
In order to get a better understanding of anything, we gather more data. When examining a notable or historic building, we move from one vantage point to another — the more angles we view the building, the better conception we have of its form. When we go inside the building, we have access to even more angles and views of that building.
Travel is basically moving from one geographical coordinate to another, and in each new position we have a new viewpoint. Over time, we accumulate a wealth of such experiences, and these experiences deepen our understanding of the world and the people around us.
I think of travel as just a special case of shifting viewpoint and engaging in new experiences. It’s a very direct and reliable way to ensure experiencing, learning, and expanding one’s knowledge. As I have posted before (https://zumpoems.com/2017/07/13/thoughtful-thursday-personal-growth/ and https://zumpoems.com/2017/07/20/thoughtful-thursday-interpretation-and-steps-prior-to-action/), we examine data (first half of the diagram below), gain knowledge, and understand –that happens whether we travel, read a novel, learn a new skill, or carry on a conversation with someone.
Yesterday, I was thinking about a place I worked at in all of 1982 and through the first half of 1983. I had a great time there. I was just starting up my career as an independent consultant, and this was the first major contract I had – – six months of guaranteed work, which ultimately resulted in a total of three six-month contracts.
I had been hoping for some time to get in touch with any of these people I had worked with at this particular company, some of whom had even gone to another company in another industry (banking) that I later worked at. Facebook seemed to be the perfect platform to connect to one or more of these people, but the ones I knew best all had fairly common first and last names. And the one person who had the unique name, a manager over all the developers at that 1982-83 company, had no footprint on either Facebook or LinkedIn.
Well, fortunately, I remembered the city of his residence in Southern California — California being the other side of the country where I live now — and I googled him and found his phone number. He was 80 years old and still living in the exact house he had lived in since the late 1970s.
I called, and after three rings, he answered. Once a large, robust man with a powerful voice, that voice was now, in contrast, frail, and I had to turn up the volume on my phone to clearly hear him. I told him how highly I thought of him, and that he was one of the best managers I ever worked with. He was suspicious of the compliment, and I told him, really, I meant what I said. Though I was a mainstay in the success of that company’s conversion from mainframes to minicomputers, and had interacted with him quite often as an instructor, software architect, developer, and later in the role of supervisor over other consultants — all during a high-pressure, high-stakes period in which all software had to be rewritten and extended for the new architecture, including adding user interfaces to allow the additional functionality to support greater user interaction and management of data — he was not able to place my distinctive voice or my name. He was truly clueless who I was.
He filled me in on what he had been doing, the companies and positions he had been working at, and a little bit about his personal life, his children, and the loss of his wife about a year ago. I offered my condolences.
I then talked about the people we had worked with, in order to help him identify me. There were some he didn’t seem to remember. I could remember last names where he couldn’t, and there was one individual, a very likeable, outwardly calm, personable chap, and a methodical mainframe programmer who learned the new programming languages and new system slightly better than most of the development staff, who, during the most-pressure filled weeks of the end of 1982, had a nervous breakdown, and was never the same. My manager friend could not remember this person at all. I offered up another individual, someone with the same first name as mine, who our manager worked fairly closely with and regularly went out to lunch with, and I mentioned that the pressure was such at the time that this individual had broken out in hives. He did remember both the person and that incident.
This gave me hope that I could still jog his memory, if for no other reason than to assure him that my compliment of him as a person and manager was authentic. I started listing off other people and their roles and some idiosyncrasies of those people, and then even of myself. Some of the names he recognized, but he couldn’t place the face. A few names he couldn’t recognize. He still couldn’t place my name, which was still totally unfamiliar to him.
Then, the obvious occurred to me — I downloaded a photo of myself from 2018 on Facebook and sent it to him, while scouting around for some less recent image of me. Fortunately, he recognized that first photo and we chatted some more — I was no longer a complete stranger to him.
So through the technology of today, I was able to instantly travel across the country and engage with someone, even traveling back into the past, awkwardly perhaps, but ultimately effective to different degrees for both of us. I was so glad I reached out to him. My original purpose was to maybe get some other contacts of those I had been closer to at that company, but it was clear from our conversation that he was no longer in contact with any of them.
Clearly, it’s impractical to keep in contact with all our former associates and friends. Facebook and LinkedIn have facilitated some of this, and what a treat it was when I first started using Facebook and chatted with friends I had not communicated with in over fifty years! But Facebook is a rather flawed platform and quite inadequate as a means of acquiring, improving, or even maintaining relationships.
Life is a matter of constantly changing one’s viewpoint and being enriched by relationships with others. I accept that some people are lost to me forever, some alive, some passed away. The key is to be open to assuming new viewpoints, not to give into stasis or a comfortable routine. In Zumwalt’s “what soul is not besieged” the embattled persona of the poem decries, “there is reason to suspect that one can grow
if only the rainy season didn’t last the entire year,” and sometimes we are so overwhelmed that we are forced into a static shell of defensive fortification, but for those times when we are not, we have the option of moving about, shifting our viewpoint, and learning, knowing, understanding, and furthering our growth.
