View from the North 40: Perspective changes everything, but it's not the only answer

“Everything in life is a matter of perspective,” that’s one of my favorite quotes from myself — though, to be fair to humans of the world, I hardly think the phrase is unique to me. Still, it is one of my few, and simple, guiding principles for life.

You just have to look at things the right way to see and understand them more clearly, or even just to feel better.

Sometimes that act of seeing, that just-right perspective, is both literal and figurative. Like a horse I saw in a video recently. That horse, head held high, was galloping along in the narrow gap between two trains moving, at speed, in opposite directions.

This is the nightmare every horse owner didn’t even dream of having, so spoiler alert, the horse lived.

I deliberately mentioned that the horse had its head up because horses use the position of their head to help them focus their eyes. When their head is down they see close things clearly, which is convenient for grazing, but to see distance they have to raise their head.

The speeding trains were mere inches away on either side of the horse, one train overtaking it and the other whizzing past. This horse had its head up and remained physically and mentally focused on that vertical stretch of blue sky and open ground ahead, rather than the speeding walls of metal death on either side of it, until the one train got by it and the horse ran free.

Perspective, it can get you out alive.

Some perspectives are purely figurative, but they can change how you look at the world.

I recently read some excerpts from the 1912 book “Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know” by Edwin Tinney Brewster who was explaining that humans see trees as these big, grand, living things, but we’re kind of wrong.

Technically speaking, most of every tree is actually dead, he said. And my brain said, “Whaaaat?”

Bark is a dead thing that thickens and flakes off the outside, and the inner woody part is a dead thing that doesn’t expand, it just gets more layers added to it, he said. The important living part is a layer between bark and wood, which, in fact, transmits nutrients and creates more bark and wood. Living parts beyond that are the leaves and any new growth and/or blossoms.

“But at least half of every living tree is already dead,” Brewster wrote, “while the larger and longer-lived a tree is, the smaller proportion of it is alive at one time.”

I will never look at a tree the same again, and I plan to read Brewster’s book.

But, no, I don’t want to discuss the irony of trees having to die, completely, to make the paper on which this idea about living trees being half-dead is printed. My brain has to deal slowly with major perspective changes, and only one at a time.

I used to worry that these slow brain moments were a sign of a weak brain, and I’ve always considered myself to be of very average intelligence — at best — but I have to say that the last six years or so people have given me a whole different perspective on my brain.

And I don’t like to brag about myself but, frankly, I’m looking pretty upper average intelligent from this new perspective.

Certainly, my IQ hasn’t increased, but I understand now that my intelligence level stacks up a bit higher than I thought it did when compared the general population.

Take, for example the unnamed 20-year-old man from Akron, Ohio, who may face criminal charges after he allegedly called in a bomb threat, and later a report that he had been shot, to police in the U.S. city of Ottawa, Ohio.

This in itself is non-event these days. However, the guy had done a Google search for the Ottawa police, but didn’t bother to read the entries before dialing, and he thought he was calling the Canadian capital of Ottawa. Twice.

“You’d think with him being from Ohio, the ‘419’ area code might have rung a bell,” Putnam County Sheriff’s Office Captain Brad Brubaker told Fox News Wednesday, adding that the guy also used his own phone which deputies traced after the first call.

After the guy found out he called the wrong country, he told dispatchers that he was trying to help the cause of the Canadian protesters by wasting police resources on bogus calls.

But that’s not the end of the revelations.

The article also reported that the Ottawa, Ohio, sheriff’s office was getting so many other mistaken calls and messages that it posted to its Facebook page Tuesday, “Just for clarification, this page is the Ottawa Police Department, in Ottawa, Putnam County, Ohio. We have been receiving calls, messages and comments from citizens in Canada. Our office wants to ensure your messages and concerns are heard by the correct agency.”

To be honest, I don’t know if a change of perspective would help anyone here, even if they held their heads high, but maybe learning to be a discerning reader would do some good.

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And now that I feel pretty good about myself, be assured that the Universe will set me on my ear soon. That’s another guiding principle in my life: The Universe does not like me to get uppity, so I'll just relax and take the hit at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .