In the public garden I walk by every day, I saw a black fish swimming in a tiny, yellow pond. Here it is, in the photo above. What do you see? Perhaps a dragon’s crest, a patch of meadow, or a leaf in the sun? What is the focal point around which you build meaning?
There are many different ways of perceiving the same image. But even more than the fish, what caught my attention was how the light transformed the surface of the leaf into a screen with a little story.
It was just one among thousands of leaves we “never see”; yet, through the light of that specific moment and from that point of view, it became a special choreography.
Interestingly enough, if I hadn’t lowered myself and changed my usual perspective, I wouldn’t have been able to see it.
But I did move down, and there at ground level, plenty of leaf-theaters opened up.
Micro-dances of light and shadow were taking place on tiny stages, right within an ordinary patch of grass, accessible only from that position, fully immersed in the context.
But in the process, I inevitably lost my perception of the garden as a whole, its scale, its shape, and my own spatial orientation within it. To recover those coordinates, I had to distance myself and move again from the detail of a macro lens back to a wide-angle view.
Would you run along the perimeter of the garden, or pause by the hollow of a tree? Perhaps we need both to truly know it, and so many other ways. Every perspective opens a door to a specific portion of reality, but at the same time, it necessarily makes us lose something else.
How do you look at and move through places?
I think this reflection is also relevant for anyone in education: have you ever observed school spaces from different points of view? From a child’s height, for instance? What details did you discover for the first time? Where do you usually position yourself to observe the children? On the threshold, on the sidelines, or in the middle of the scene?
There are no privileged points of view, and none exclude another. If we become aware of this multiplicity, our vision can be enriched without creating divisions, opening a dialogue toward a more integrated, dynamic and complex view.
What is seen depends on how you look. For observing is not just a receiving, an uncovering, but at the same time a creative act.
Søren Kierkegaard