Perspective on Perspective
Arriving back in Ōtautahi, Christchurch and perspective is on my mind. How time and distance changes what you see.
I am always keenly aware of perspective when I am here in Aotearoa, New Zealand. I have been back and forth for twenty years now — and each time I return — I understand more clearly what it is to see from here, instead of seeing from there. The world looks different viewed from these South Pacific shores. Time too brings perspective. A temporal perspective. The long view. In twenty years, a lot changes. I drink cocktails now with the baby sisters I once held in my arms. A small nephew runs rings around me. Twenty years ago, his parents were in school classrooms on different sides of the globe. Sometimes it all takes my breath away. All that’s happened in between.
Perhaps it’s the in-and-out, back-and-forth that brings this heightened sense of perspective. Like revisiting a favourite woodland or garden as the seasons cycle through. What you notice in the light of winter so different from what’s there on a long summer evening. When you keep going away and coming back, it becomes crystal clear that everything is moving, changing, growing all the time. Buried in the day to day, it can be easy to miss what’s happening, right before your eyes.
Nowhere brings this home to me more than being back here in Ōtautahi, Christchurch. It’s a place I’ve visited many times over the years, but really made an impact four years ago when I was here exploring behind the scenes of social entrepreneurship here on a Winston Churchill Fellowship*. The city was in recovery phase after two devastating earthquakes, and I was spending time with some of the people shaping the transitional, post-quake cityscape. Back then, there was a lot of empty, a lot of demolition and a lot of gritty, focused, creative energy. I found strong networks of relationship and a mentality of abundance amongst the rubble and the endless traffic cones. I discovered stories of ‘we’ and began to see systems more clearly.
Four years on, and I am back here for the Social Enterprise World Forum, a significant international gathering of social enterprise practitioners and supporters. Already, the city these visitors will see is not the city as it was back in 2013. Wandering the streets now, there is much more shiny. Sparkling shopping precincts, bars, corporate HQs and a spotless bus station. In places, it smells new, as if just hatched moments ago. There are surprises everywhere and a sense of up-and-coming once again. The hub and the bub of construction as the city grows back into its new shape.
Alongside the cityscape, I see in sharp relief too how the people and ventures I met four years ago have moved on and evolved. It prompts me to reflect on my own journey in that time too. What distance has been travelled by us all.
The theme for the Forum is Ka Korokī Te Manu — ‘creating our tomorrow’ — an invitation to look forward and explore the endless possibilities ahead of us. It’s an uplifting, encouraging, important sentiment. But I can’t help looking back a bit too. Appreciating all that’s gone on to bring us to where we are. Appreciating the places, the faces, the experiences that give us the eyes we have. We each bring ourselves to where we stand. I think of this walking past an installation of 185 different chairs created in remembrance to those whose lives were lost in the quakes. A poignant reminder of all we are alongside each other.
So my perspective on perspective going into this busy week back in this busy, emergent city is that being aware of where you are seeing from is valuable. This city and its history — and my history with this city — are a brilliant, stark reminder of how things look different, depending on where you stand, when you stand there and — as well — who you are at that moment. This place is so achingly, impossibly different to what it was 10 years ago, even 5 years ago. I recognise that I am probably quite different too.
For me, this is what thinking and doing outdoors is all about. Noticing, finding and exploring new vantage points, new perspectives — and bringing them into our thought processes, our conversations. There is always a new hill to climb, a new path to walk, new buildings to notice — and in places like this rapidly evolving city sometimes these literally appear before your eyes.
Over the coming days I will walk these strangely changing streets, and I hope to find a few new perspectives of my own.
*The full text of my Churchill Fellowship Report can be found here
