Perspective is Everything

Personal Reflections on the Sagittarius Full Moon

I was stretched out on a patch of green astroturf in the basement at my best friend’s housewarming party.

It was June 9, 2001.

Behind me, though I didn’t know it yet, sat my future husband.

His quiet countenance in the corner captivated my curiosity. Who was this watcher of the room, and what was he thinking when our eyes met?

At some point, the laughter from the other side of the room drew me to sit up.

As I shifted my gaze from what was behind me to the people gathered in front of me, I heard a phrase come from everywhere and nowhere at once:

Perspective is everything.

Maybe it was the absinthe.

At the time, I had no idea how important those words would become.

Over the next twenty years, they would reveal themselves as both a warning and a guiding light.

A warning against the perils and pitfalls of mistaking our perspective for the whole truth, at the expense of being curious about another person’s experience.

A reminder that certainty can suffocate a relationship.

And a guiding light pointing toward the possibility that life can change the moment we are willing to look at it from another angle.

I am still learning what that phrase means.

Looking back, it’s hard to miss how large the Sagittarius invitation loomed over that day.

What we didn’t know that night, when sparks flew between our hands as they touched for the first time, was that the story we immediately began telling ourselves would bear only a passing resemblance to the one we would eventually live.

We didn’t know that love would ask us questions we weren’t prepared to answer.

We didn’t know that children would arrive carrying perspectives neither of us could have imagined.

We didn’t know that life would repeatedly invite us to reconsider our assumptions about love, identity, belonging, family, and what it means to become fully ourselves.

We didn’t know that some of our deepest growth would come through experiences that challenged our closely held beliefs.

All we knew was that two lost souls had found their way to one another.

Everything else would take years to reveal itself.

That is the gift of Sagittarius.

Not having all the answers.

Not being right.

Not certainty.

But the willingness to let experience broaden our perspective until we can see something we could not see before.

Perspective is everything.