Raise your hand in front of you, palm outwards, and look at it. Take a moment to take it in, and see its shape, see what it is. Now turn it over and look at your palm. Once you’ve taken that in, spin it around. Look at it from close, far, up or down; move your fingers around. What you have just done is exactly what you did when you were first born and were exploring the world. This is the first thing you did; your own hands and feet were the first subjects in your life of discovery. This is the innate wisdom of the child. We spin our hands around to get multiple takes on them because simply looking at your extended hand without seeing the palm or where the skin bends in the joints it is difficult to know what it is, and what it is for. Sure this might sound silly now, but that is because you know what hands are. When you were born you had no idea, and this is how you started the exploration of hands, most likely followed by experiments with smell and taste.

This process is a crucial one to create the knowledge and understanding that our species claims exclusivity to on this planet. Yet curiously it is a process that is lost in many through life. Changing perspective or perception is an action that allows understanding be that in the immediate physical world, or in the more abstract one of personality, happiness, and life in general.

“Getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to me” How many people have said that or heard that? It comes from the hearts and mouths of those who got their comfortable little reality rattled, and were forced to make a change. It forces one to break a routine, and thusly offers a good chance to step outside of one’s usual view point. By rotating one’s life like one’s hand, one can gain a deeper understanding of it to positive effect. I will go out on a bit of a limb here and state that every single widening of perception ever had in all of mankind has been for the better.

I am not saying getting fired is always good, but people who say it was good say so because they changed their perspectives in a completely novel way. Depression, frustration, and resentment towards one’s work and general situation are unfortunately a common thing in modern society, and it is not a surprising destination given the claustrophobic tunnel by which people get there.

People are divided into categories from the minute they attend school, and often remain within those groups until adulthood and beyond. Because various subjects are divided in different classes there emerge leaders and not-so-leaders in every one of them. Lines are inevitably drawn between students, and groups are formed. Everyone wants to feel good about themselves, so they put their focus in what they do best, and thusly find more in common with those who put their efforts in the same field. Conversely, no one likes to feel bad or worse than others the effect being that jocks will put more thought into mocking mathematics than studying it, and that nerds will put more effort into analyzing and judging the behavior of jocks rather than in the actual exercises.  This creates groups founded on common interests, but on common disinterests as well. The result is different directions for life taken by different individuals according to their personalities, tastes, and dreams. This important decision is taken at around the venerable age of 7.

Children playing in the sands of pre-scholastic time are often rarely as divided as they are in school. School encourages division leading to narrowness of view and mind over the course of its duration. Through elementary school the jocks continue to practice sports sometimes falling behind in other areas further reducing the motivation to put effort in areas they feel inferior in, sometimes attacking those other groups to solidify their own position. This applies to all clicks and groups.

As high school arrives old childhood bonds that grouped students socially in spite of educational division are ruptured. New people are introduced, and social standing suddenly matters a lot more. Now not only are nerds and jocks not on the same page, but they don’t even know each others books. Readers will recognize that weird made up rule of clicks that forbids mixing and that talking to someone viewed as an outcast by one’s own group on penalty of social suicide. Now groups are more isolated than ever. People naturally flock to the ones who have similar interests, join the same classes, clubs, and events constantly being surrounded by like-minded people who, especially in high school, rarely attempt new activities where lack of experience invites the high school bane of ridicule. Resentment is developed between groups as each envies some aspect of the other simply because Human beings are not meant to be so narrowly constrained to one area of interest.

University and college roll around, those that don’t attend feel distanced from those that do, and the ones that do are now in very specialized fields in some cases breaking up the clicks even further. The emo kids will go into music or visual arts, the nerds in engineering or biology, the jocks in sports or emergency services. Campuses can have a positive effect by the simple act of bringing together vast groups of (theoretically) mature people with diverse interests. But for the most part friends are made among classmates, and discussions revolve around the common field of study. These people go on to become the coworkers that one sees every day while they all do the same thing in the same place. One pursues activities relating to it, and some find a spouse in the field. Just like that, Humans are divided and constrained to certain points of view on the hand of Life. It is a subtle maneuver that makes itself known with three well placed blows: breaking first the united friendliness of childhood into the growing distance of friends in elementary school, exploiting the opening as a sharper break in high school, followed by a specialization uppercut in post secondary, for a divisive K.O in Life.

This is one of the primary reasons, I believe, for the high amounts of misery in society. In what seems like a blink of an eye, a person goes from being a child exploring every nook and cranny of the world to an adult thinking and doing the same thing every day.  This can have destructive effects on a life as it brings misery and robs the sand square of time from under one’s feet.

Time is a measure of change. I believe this means that by adding change and novelty to one’s life one can effectively prolong time. Vacationers always feel like they have been at their destination for much longer than they have because everything is new. On the other hand however, if there is no change then time just flies by. If someone does the same thing the same way everyday they will close their eyes for a minute and seven years will have eloped with the boredom and misery of repetition. Sadly, our society is organized in a way that encourages such behavior, and in many cases ruled by those who abide fervently to it.

It is hard indeed to identify the source of pain on the palm if one obstinately continues to look only at the back of the hand. One can theorize on the source and vainly try to apply remedies without looking at the problem. This is why people who get fired feel good: because they turn their hand over and apply ointment to the burn instead of trying to bandage blindly. Many people end up in jobs that don’t suit them, yet don’t know so because they haven’t explored the rest of the angles. Based on the results they had one day in one class as a kid they slowly started to ignore all other fields in order to focus on just one. One shouldn’t be surprised if their seven year old self didn’t correctly pin the interest tail on the right end of the happiness donkey on the first try.

Happy people don’t always do everything differently or something insanely new and wacky everyday. They do have routines, but those lifestyles were picked and chosen, carved, tweak and customized based on a large array of experiences some of which were highly enjoyable, others which were not, but all of which were valuable. It is one thing to do yoga and not like it, it is another to not like yoga because it falls out of your realm of designated interests and experiences.

Even the already studied subjects can take on a whole new light under different angles. I was never fascinated by mathematics I was more interested in history and the likes, but when I learned of the mathematical progress made in history and how it applied to monuments, legends, astronomy, theology, and even poetry I was intrigued and realized I should have listened more in high school, and that perhaps there should be more interaction between subjects and their students.

People are afraid to branch out and explore other subjects that they know nothing of because it is uncomfortable. We all know that panicky moment that comes when some asks, “do you know what… is?” followed by a hastily blurted yes before trying to piece little bits of information together to try and get an idea of what the conversation is even about. It is humbling to walk up to someone and admit that you know nothing of the field, but are willing to learn. Humbling, but good for the mind and soul. Physics aren’t just complicated equations that physicists make up to make their lives difficult. They calculate and explain some truly fascinating and wonderful phenomena of existence that don’t require undivided lifelong attention to physics to appreciate and think about.

Lastly, expanding one’s field of interests and activities allows the individual to meet new people with different interests. Maybe someone doing a sample yoga class will meet a Hindu, who will then show the former that there is more to Hinduism than elephants with four arms and sacred cows. With knowledge comes understanding, and with understanding comes harmony. Judgement, conflict, and religious hatred, among other vile things, are based in and can exist solely on the basis of ignorance of the other points of view.  Not all Muslims blow up, not all Jews are bankers, and not all Christians are crusaders contrary to what narrow-minded media would have you believe.

It makes me want to cry when I hear someone say something like “Hi I’m Joe, and I’m an accountant.” That simple and very common act of stating occupation to designate oneself reduces the beauty and potential of the Human being to a cruelly simple form; it is stating the pinky nail to describe the hand. Joe, you are not just an accountant. You might spend your days  counting numbers, but you are forever a living, loving, thinking, laughing Human being for whom the world is an oyster of endless possibility’s, even if you are forty-five.

People are so quick to deny experiences that they have never had before because it falls outside their comfort zone. This stems from the same juvenile desire to be good at everything we do, and fear that joining a new area of interest late in the game puts us at a disadvantage.  Nothing is more wrong. New experiences put us at an advantage by exploring new feelings in mind and body, and allow us to experience a bit more of this mysterious and beautiful thing we designate by the sound that the letters L-i-f-e make. Life begins where the comfort zone ends, so go try something new. Hint: if the thought of doing something scares you, then that’s a good place to start.

One should not fear change. Many people feel comfort in routine and the known side of the hand. However, Life and the personality are just like the hand is. They are a whole that can be seen from many angles and negating one side does not nullify its existence, nor does tentatively turning it over obliterate the former side never to be seen again. We are who we are, the heart knows, and keeping the mind in the dark does not change that. I could never imagine living my whole life having never seen the underside of my hands, could you?