21/08/2026
Today I watched a large plane flying low over the field.
As I watched it getting further away, a crow flew across the sky. For a moment, the crow and the plane looked exactly the same size.
It got me thinking about perspective.
I knew they weren't the same size. I know for a fact that a crow is considerably smaller than a plane, but if I didn't already have that information, what I could see with my own eyes in that moment would have told me that they were the same size.
There was no doubt about what I was seeing. From where I was standing, they looked the same.
A few seconds later, as they continued moving, the crow actually looked bigger than the plane.
Of course, neither the crow nor the plane had suddenly changed size.
Only my perspective had changed.
I couldn't help thinking about how often this happens in life.
We see a situation from where we're standing and, naturally, we make sense of it using the information we have available to us.
Someone standing in a different field could have been watching that exact same crow and that exact same plane at the exact same moment and seen something completely different.
Their view wouldn't necessarily have been wrong.
Mine wasn't necessarily wrong either.
They were just different perspectives of the same thing.
The difference with the plane and the crow was that I had an absolute fact to compare my perspective to. I knew which one was bigger, so I knew that what I was seeing wasn't an accurate reflection of their actual size.
Life isn't usually quite that simple.
How many times do we look at a situation from our own perspective and believe that what we can see must be the absolute truth?
How often do we fill in the bits we can't see?
And how often do we forget that somebody standing somewhere else might be seeing the exact same situation completely differently?
The thing is, we don't always need to know all the facts.
Sometimes we just need the awareness that our perspective is exactly that — our perspective.
It doesn't necessarily make us right.
It doesn't necessarily make us wrong.
It's simply the view from where we're standing, shaped by our experiences, our knowledge, our emotions and the information we have at that particular moment.
And sometimes, moving just a little further along changes the view completely.
I think there's something quite freeing in being able to say:
This is how it looks from where I'm standing, but I accept that I might not be seeing the whole picture.
Because when we start treating our perspective as absolute fact, without leaving any room for another view or for information we might not have, it can be damaging — both to ourselves and to the people around us.
Sometimes the plane really is much bigger than the crow.
Even when, from exactly where you're standing, you could swear they're the same size. ❤️
