It’s all a matter of perspective…

I read an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning called, “The housing slump has Salem on a Witch hunt again.”  

While this article was nothing earth shattering, it made me realize that like everything in life, the conclusions we choose to draw about people, events, things, etc. are all about our own perspectives. The article stated that due to the housing slump, and a glut of foreclosed homes on the market, Realtors and buyers are seeking clever ways to rid homes of what they call, “energy imprints,” which are mainly negative vibes that they claim are stuck in the homes, causing them to either linger on the market- or give the new owner the heebie jeebies. The healers, which for obvious reasons in Salem, MA are better known as witches, go into a house and do their ‘hocus pocus’ to cleanse the house of any negative energy, with the desired affect that the new buyer can live there without any stagnant emotional clutter from the person who has been foreclosed on.  Perhaps these ‘cleanings’ pave the way for a buyer to feel okay about taking over a house when the previous owner could not make the payments, and lost the house? A way to cope with the fact that they are benefiting from someone else’s downfall.

As a Realtor, I understand about negative energy in a house, and I agree without a doubt that it can be felt in some homes. But this is coming from my perspective, and maybe all of this rhetoric is just imagined in our heads because we seek a certain outcome to events? We humans have to find a way to explain and justify things to ourselves so that they make sense to us.  Such a simple overall concept, but in reality- what complex webs we weave!

As a resident of Tucson, AZ, it is quite amazing to watch both the local and national spin doctors put their different takes on last Saturday’s January 8th shooting spree that targeted Representative Gabrielle Giffords and her constituents in a neighborhood Safeway parking lot. Laying blame not to the shooter himself, but to all the extraneous factors that  led him to do what he did- in a way that fits their own personal agendas… Without getting into the obvious bipartisan political spins and finger pointing, each individual’s perspective on this horrible tragedy may lead them down any number of mental paths as a means of trying to understand and comprehend the reason(s) why this senseless act occurred in our community. It’s important to note that we all do this form of rationalizing to explain to ourselves and others the reasons why we think this tragedy (or any other given tragedy) happened- in order to make the reasons for ‘the tragedy’ fit a pattern that is consistent with our own thinking.

Perhaps what I’ve taken away from the witches article, is that the simplest path is nearly always the one that offers the most clarity, but may not fit with our own beliefs.  Simply: this act was committed by an extremely troubled individual with serious mental health issues. Once the dust settles, I would not be surprised if the killer is discovered to be a paranoid schizophrenic. We can choose to take any perspective on why it happened, but the bottom line is that our own perspectives are just that- our own perspectives.  Sometimes it is easier to try to explain why we think something happened (to make it fit our own agenda), than it is to extract the simplest possible explanation at face value. Remember the old statement we learned in school, “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line?” The witches may not agree with that…