Zoo trip offers perspective

Kaity Holtman

We took a mini vacation to the Omaha Zoo this weekend.

With the house building and baby growing processes, one overnight in Omaha was about all we could pull together.

As Sam celebrates being a whole year and a half old this week, he, like most little boys, is absolutely obsessed with animals.

Farm animals.

Zoo animals.

Jungle animals.

You name it, he loves it. And his list of (pretty impressive) animal noises seems to grow daily.

My favorite to hear are currently the rooster and the elephant.

Anyway, I have been planning this trip for months, waiting for the perfect weekend. Fall brought us an older little boy who probably understood more than he would have earlier this year. Not to mention, we had incredible weather to spend the day walking outside.

And in my vision, he would be mind-blowingly excited about every animal we would see.

But in reality, I think maybe he was a little overwhelmed by it all.

We got some smiles out of him, and a few animal noises.

But instead of showing a lot of excitement, it was more evident that he was just really taking it all in.

He would just stare at the gorillas and stingrays and all the different animals. He would point occasionally.

But we also exhausted him with all there was to take in. That kid was worn out by the time we left the park.

There were a couple times we would stop by an exhibit and wonder why he wasn’t excited. I’d squat down to talk to him in his stroller, and suddenly I would realize, he can’t even see what we were seeing.

For example, we walked up to the polar bear, and I pointed it out. Then, after no reaction, I got down his level and realized he couldn’t see above the water in the glass tank.

He needed to be lifted up to see.

The same was the case with the penguins or the tiger cage.

The rest of the time, I made the effort to see it from his level to make sure he was getting the bang for his buck. (Yes, he had free access to the zoo, but you know what I mean.)

How often do we look at life from our own perspective and assume everyone can see what we see?

How often do we get mad at people because we just don’t understand why they don’t have the same point of view as us?

Our perspective can be seen as right or wrong because it’s all we see.

When in reality, they aren’t getting the full picture, or we are getting a completely different picture. We can only see what’s underwater, while they can see only what’s on the shore above the water.

I am probably guilty every day of assuming people see life from my perspective. But in reality, my seat is very different from someone on the other side of the theater.

How many of us are guilty of being so invested in an organization or project that we are working on, that we don’t see the big picture of how it is either affecting or being affected by the world around us?

In politics, in religion, in opinions of every kind, are we getting on the level of others to make sure we understand where they are coming from?

Are we opening up conversation? Are we talking about people when they frustrate us, or to people when we need to address a difference of opinion?

I never thought this tiny little human would give me so many life lessons before he could ever formulate a sentence or more than a handful of words and animal noises.

But he most definitely has.

Sometimes it’s simpler than we realize, or way more complicated than we can imagine.

But whatever it is, we don’t know everything, and we can’t see every situation from every perspective, unless we ask questions, seek to understand, and truly make the effort to understand how someone else is viewing life.

Kaity Holtman is the Agriculture Editor for the Maryville Daily Forum.