“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Marcel Proust

One of my favorite things to do with photography is to look at familiar views through an unfamiliar lens – or inventive framing. In this rapidly changing springtime, of course, everything looks different just about every day and it really is “fresh eyes” all the time.

Over the weekend I caught a different glimpse of the Mayo house while walking Max; same with the neighbor behind them on Saint Patrick Street. Also the Temple residence on Park Avenue (at Saint Patrick) and finally the house across the street as well as – always – just about every time I look at Maul-Hall.

I especially like this post’s “feature photograph” of the Temple home because it is taken through the wet trees which look so fresh and vibrant after Sunday morning’s rains.

This all serves to remind me that we know next to nothing about anything if we fail to take the time or the trouble to look through more than one lens, or perspective or framing.

Because there is no real knowing outside of seeing from different angles and listening to other voices and having the humility to understand that we can always learn from an alternative or additional point of view.

This is a critically important principle

If we are not careful – and we are not – we tend not only to look at things from the same set of assumptions every time we consider them, but we also seem to go out of our way to find people who see the same things in the same way that we do.

Somehow many of us have become not only rooted in our narrow point of view but so fearful of being swayed we won’t even engage in the conversation.

So what is more important? Dialogue and learning and common understanding between good people – or blind allegiance to what usually turns out to be some flawed ideology or a corrupt personality?

Hence one of my foundational principles regarding views and opinions: “I am likely wrong as often as I am right if not more so. So any exchange of views leaves us all necessarily better equipped to discover truth.”

Real journalism (and I feel that this blog still honors that tradition in the writing) is not about viewing or describing only what we are shown, or what we are told, or what we can see from where everyone else is already standing. It involves looking at things from other viewpoints and perspectives, going around the back, taking the photographs ourselves, talking with the neighbors, doing the research, fact-checking, asking questions and refusing to swallow anything whole.

What we can ultimately know is often contingent on how we frame things, how open we are to learn, pushing aside our own preconceptions, listening and seeing with new eyes.

Because truth matters – DEREK