Picking Perspective

The summer had been blisteringly hot, but this day trumped them all.  The thermometer climbed past 95 degrees fahrenheit with out breaking a sweat, the rest of us on the other hand, were dripping.

This was the day we had planned to take a group of children from our neighborhood to go berry picking.  When the time came, we piled ourselves into our very unfortunately not air conditioned cars and made the 45 minute trek out of the city to the berry farm.

Having the windows down while driving 55 miles per hour on the highway helped alleviate the heat a bit, but as soon as we took the exit for the farm the lively conversations in the back seat stilled and the windows started to creep their way closed.

"What are you doing!?  Roll the windows back down!  It's hot!" I exclaimed.

"NO WAY!" cried the children, "who knows what's out there!"

They gazed at the cornfields with trepidation.

"You never know, some monster might pop out of there and kill us!" one little boy cried.

"And if something happened there's no one  around for miles!  Nobody would even know you were hurt!" added another.

As a country girl transplanted to the big city, I was bewildered. 

The country...not safe?  

I had grown up hearing about how dangerous the city was. How there was so much violence.  How there were so many people around something bad was bound to happen. 

The city was to be feared and avoided. 

But these kids were expressing the exact opposite sentiment.  I had never seen any tremble at the sight of a cornfield before. 

It made me realize how much of what we consider to be safe a matter of perception.  We trust what we know and what is familiar to us.  I am still more leery of the city streets at night than I am a cornfield or hiking deep into the woods, but this doesn't mean that those places are inherently "safer."  It just means, they're more familiar.

Upon insisting that, no, absolutely no horror-movie-esque monsters were going to rise up out of the corn and eat them, the kids exited our cars and picked berries to their hearts content.  

This was three summers ago, and we've taken kids back every year since then.  This year, we had to split the kids in to three different groups and take them on different days because so many of them wanted to go to the farm.  It's less scary each time.  The windows stay down, they even wandered into the cornfield with a farmer this summer to learn about how the corn grows.  

It makes me think that perhaps we all need to go a little bit out of our way to hang out in places that make us a little uncomfortable, and maybe even a little bit scared.  Go. Find those places. Pick berries while you're there.  See the good.  Find the things that are sweet. And then keep going back.  Over time you just might find the place that you feared just wasn't so scary after all.