06.27.10
Cow Tragedy
- Image by coincoyote via Flickr
Perspective. It’s hard to recognize and hard to maintain.
Yesterday my boyfriend and I drove along a back rural road, en route to get ice cream. We thought it’d be faster than the direction the GPS was giving us.
All of a sudden, at the crest of the hill we saw flashing lights. Cars were stopped outside a farmer’s cow barn. My boyfriend said, “I think one of them got hit! See how he’s limping running up the hill?”
We felt simultaneously bad for the cow and frustrated at the clock ticking. The ice cream place would be closing in less than 15 minutes!
But we understood–this was probably a typical Saturday night for these hard-working farmers.
Later, at the ice cream place, we ran into friends who had been at the cow barn. They were there helping. To get the cows into the barn.
The cows that had broken the fence. We told our version of the story and they laughed.
Funny how our perspective drives our behavior, motivation, attitude, and actions and reactions.
What if we could recognize every time that our perspective is just one of many. And maybe it could even be—wrong.
Humor helps cushion this realization and allow us to realx into it. Maybe our perspective doesn’t always have to be right. And maybe the cows are all O.K.
