A Matter of Perspective

Earlier today, my sister sent this ‘Ostrich on a wooden backdrop’ picture to our family group chat (ooh! Am I flouting the rules to use another person’s photo?!) Her partner was being all manly in his response to the lockdown and had begun frantically chopping excessive amounts of wood (presumably, to keep some warmth in the event of their lives moving any closer towards 28 Days Later than it is already!)

It reminded me of my eldest; she’s very adept at seeing pictures in the quirkiest of places- she’s always at it (“look Mummy, there’s definitely a pride of lions amongst those tree roots”). Over the last couple of days, she’s been busy responding to a choreography challenge that was set by her dance teacher. The outcome was two pieces; one beautiful lyrical number on her own & a ‘commercial’ number, featuring yours truly as her delinquent backing dancer!

I shared said videos far & wide with family & friends. The general consensus was: “wow! Is that all her own work?”. It was absolutely, from conception to execution, yes! The girl has great vision; she really does see the world with an open, inquisitive & wide-ranging mind which I’m sure will serve her well & I’m so very proud of her.

Thinking about perspective and vision put me in mind of the following quotation from George Eliot’s Middlemarch; a novel which is possibly one of the best to come from Victorian realism:

“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”