Perspective.

I was reading in the National Geographic today about languages that are disappearing. Apparently they estimate that a language dies every 14 days! There is one, Tuvan, which is a language spoken in Russia by only 235,000 people as of now, of which they gave some example words and their meanings. Two of these words were songgaar: "go back; the future" and burungaar: "go forward; the past." The article then says, "Tuvans believe the past is ahead of them while the future lies behind. The[y]...look to the future. but it's behind them, not yet seen."
When I first read them, I thought "well that is backwards, it makes no sense." The more I thought about it, though, the more sense it made, and I realized that even though the way I viewed these ideas (the past is behind us, the future ahead) is to the best of my knowledge the way everyone in my world has always viewed them as well, that doesn't mean it is necessarily correct. Or maybe it would be better to say the only correct way to view them. In reality, the ideas of "future" and "past" are not physically somewhere in relation to us, so there is no reason why the ideas both can't be right.
I've been thinking a lot about perspectives lately, probably because it has come up in a lot of life lessons lately. Maybe everyone else is already aware of this, but to me it seems like a change in perspective is a better way to find happiness than just focusing on a positive/negative dichotomy. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with trying to look on the bright side and stay happy no matter what happens. But sometimes, i'mma be honest, that is hard and really just not effective, for me anyway. I feel like I'm lying to myself when I'm trying to stay positive but still know deep down that something straight-up sucks. I'm really only able to get past things when I can realize that yeah, maybe this does suck, or at least part of it does, but there is this whole other vantage point that in my narrow-mindedness I couldn't or wouldn't see. And when I finally do see it, my brain just kind of goes "ooohhhh. well, duh." The problem is opening up my mind and getting to that point, which, to be honest, rarely happens totally on my own.
To use another National Geographic example, maybe a slightly metaphorical one: there are some cities, such as Seoul, Bangkok, and Paris, that just don't have a lot of room for gardens and green spaces. With problems like that it's easy to just say "Well, that's too bad, I guess don't move to the city if you're looking for that sort of thing." It's not like this is a problem I was actively trying to solve, but if I read in the newspaper an article about how there was no room, I would probably just accept it and feel a little sad. Luckily there are people who don't just settle for that, and now there is an increasing movement to grow gardens pretty dang efficiently up the sides of buildings, like so:

"Ooohhh. Well, duh. There is so much space there just waiting to be used." The plants help with air quality, bring beauty to crowded cities, and some of them are even vegetable gardens. Perspective.

This may have not made much sense. But this was one of those "learn-as-you-blog" posts that helped me more than anything. Thank you for your time.

P.S. I went to look up the Angelina Jolie Sleeping Beauty movie, and I thought you had texted me that it was called "Magnificent." Turns out it's called Malificent ha. If you thought it was kind of dumb of me to ask what it is about with that title. I just wanted to redeem myself a little.