Perspective:
What is Yours?

excerpt from Dream: Land in Reality

We live our lives on the ground floor so much of the time. We dodge this car and that one on the freeway. We maneuver our shopping carts in man-made aisles. We eat and sleep on the same level as the ground…or maybe one or two floors above. What we see in front of us is a monument to what we think the world is all about. In the old adage, we can’t see the forest from the trees.

So, my advice is to change your perspective. To get up above the tree tops and look down on what you are traversing. Maybe it looks like an unending maze when you are in it, but once you are looking down at it, you realize that there is a pattern, a path to success.

Sometimes, you want to shout at the top of your lungs to the dummy below, “turn left, not right. The door you are looking for is just around the corner, but not the corner you are turning into.” And yet, each of us is just like the person in the maze as we maneuver our lives.

I have been fortunate during several periods of my life to live high above the fray so to speak. For some reason, I first moved into my first high rise onto the 22nd floor, one short of the top. The top floor was a radio station which had some equipment (to this day I do not know what) that would hum through my ceiling in my Rush Street entertainment-Mecca Chicago abode. Swearing did not help. They just ignored me. After all, was I not the person below them? At that moment, I vowed to live on the top floor of every building I lived…and most of the time, I was successful at that.

My next home was on the top floor of a building on the Gold Coast of Chicago. It was the corner “penthouse” unit. I was the first tenant to ever live there; in fact, when I first visited it, there were no windows. Believe me, 52 floors up in Chicago, windows are kind of nice to have. I really began to understand the term Windy City.