Sunlight on the water

I am fortunate to live by the sea and love to walk along the coast. Have you ever noticed how, if you look towards the sun across the water, as long as it is not obscured by clouds, there is always a glimmering pathway of sunlight across the water directly between you to the sun? It almost looks as if you could walk across is and the sun is inviting to come.

If you move, the path moves with you. It always leads directly to the sun. It works the same with the moon if it is bright and low enough, or I guess with any source of light if it is bright enough to show up against the background light it is shining in.

What I love is that this is the same for everyone; anyone looking would have a path, but you can only see your own path. If our paths are far apart, we may not even be able to see objects that visible in someone else’s ‘light path’, such as things that may be blocking the light, or reflecting it differently. In that moment, each path is unique, it goes to your eyes, and your eyes only.

If we think about it, it is obvious that the light is there the same for everyone; bouncing off the water in every direction where it is not blocked. We see it as a path to us because our eyes are only seeing the rays of light that are shining, or reflecting, directly into them and that is making a path. The light, and the path, isn’t really exclusively there for us, it just looks like it.

It’s true that if you stand in a group, or next to each other, your individual paths will theoretically overlap to form what would be a wide path, but you cannot see that whole wide path, or the path of others more distant from you, you can only see your path. The path of someone standing nearby may look remarkably similar to yours, but the only way your paths would be exactly the same would be if you were standing in the same shoes (at the same time), or if one of you were sitting on the other’s shoulders.

There are lots of messages you can take from this but the main thing it makes me think about is perspective…. the concept that what you see is affected by where you are looking at things from. Perspective applies to life in so many ways, and this is a wonderful real-life illustration of it; the path we see is only the path from our perspective – from where we are standing.

Unlike with the sunlit path however, which is merely our eyes picking up light, when we look at other things in life it isn’t only our eyes that are picking up information and interpreting it, forming it into the pathways we see before us; very often it is our minds that create our perspective, how we see things. What we see is affected by what we think and believe, how we feel, and what we already know (or think we do), as well as the context and the physical angle we are looking at them from. All these things affect which rays of light, or information, we pick up to form our particular path; our perspective on the truth of a situation, or what is happening.

Our brains tend to pick up the information that fits with the way we are looking at it, and so to us the path to what we are seeing is direct… yet we need to remember, it is just our perspective, it is not the only path, we just cannot see that of others. We can shift our perspective, and see a different path, but we would need to be willing to move to do that; physically, or in our thinking.

So maybe when we think we are right, and in a position to judge someone else’s motives, reactions, or understanding, we should think of the sunlight on the water and remember, the path we see may be obvious, and direct, to us, but they may be seeing a different path which will be equally true and direct, from where they are standing.

To see the sunlit path someone else is seeing all we have to do is move to our bodies to stand in their original position, whereas to see other things from someone else’s perspective we need to move more than our bodies. We may be able to see it in our mind’s eye by finding out more about what is influencing their perspective; we may choose to move to where they are, so that our path moves with us, but maybe the most important thing to start with is to remember we are not the only ones with a path, and in the matter of perspective, your path is never wrong, it is just a path, not the path.

The sun is there for all of us after all.

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Photo by: Seanrwatson