As a result of a small spill while warming up in boot camp, I found myself back at the orthopedic surgeon looking at an X-Ray for clues. The doc looked at my plate and screws (yes, I am a bionic woman now) which he installed in my knee after my ski accident and declared me in great shape. But ouch – I heard something pop and insisting that I heard something, suggested that it might have been my lateral ligament. No. Not that. I sat there, with what my kids would call “the look” and waited patiently while he turned back to the X-Ray. There it was a little higher up – a small non-displaced fracture of my femoral condyle.
The lesson here is the importance of perspective and looking at things from all angles – and of course, thinking out of the bun or out of the box, depending on your preferences.
The following week I launched a search for a shoe horn. Wearing a splint locked in a straight position, I had trouble getting my lovely new shoe on my left foot. I searched high and low for a shoe horn. They apparently don’t exist anymore.
But wait – in the middle of the night I sat bolt upright. What happened to the shoe horn that I brought home from my Dad’s last year? My Dad had a whole collection of fancy shoe horns and insisted I take one as I moved him from his apartment, I somehow remembered putting it on a brass nail near the bottom of the stairs.
The next morning, I peered over the rail, and sure enough, I had walked by the shoe horn every day even after I began my search. By looking for it from a different angle, there it was.
To me, this is a metaphor for not seeing the obvious or what is right under your nose all the time. How are YOU going to look at things from a different perspective?