Perspective is everything.
My brother walked up to me this afternoon and proudly displayed his bandaid covered hand to me.
“Look,” he said “I’ve got three scratches! Well, actually. Two scratches. And a cut.”
When I asked him what happened, he explained that he had sliced his finger open while attempting to cut a piece of bread.
I looked at it and without even thinking said, “Wow, that’s brutal.”
He took a second, glanced down at his finger, looked back up at me and asked, “Is ‘brutal’ just another way of saying ‘really cool?'”
I had been viewing this cut as any normal adult who’s crossed over into the realm of Realism and Less-Than-Wondrous-Imagination-Ism would: As a cut. A failure, even. A signal that some finer motor skills were in need of sharpening and not much else.
He was viewing this small cut as a true battle scar, a sign of a warrior, a mark to remember his victory over that one loaf of bread. He looked down at his bandaged finger and though, “Wow, that is really cool.”
He took what I perceived as a failure and turned it into a means of displaying his toughness to the world.
Perspective is everything.