What would you have done if you were in my shoes?

It happened suddenly. One night, I had gone to sleep, a normal man. The next morning I got up, a thoroughly abnormal individual.

At that time, I was a moderately well-to-do writer. I had no living relatives and lived alone in my apartment.

That morning, I switched on the TV. A cartoon was being shown but the sound I heard was not the sound of a cartoon but of news being read. Was something wrong with the TV?

Had two channels somehow got mixed up? Then I heard the news reader announce the date. I sat bolt-upright. How could it be the 25th of May, today? Yesterday, when I had gone to sleep, it had been the 20th. What was going on? Had I slept for four days – a modern day Rip Van Winkle? I ran outside, picked up the newspaper lying on my doorstep and looked at the date. Twenty first of May.

So, after all, I had not slept for four days.

That was just the beginning. That whole day, I kept hearing voices: Voices of my friends, my neighbors, the voice of my sweet heart, and my own voice. What was going on? Was I going mad? But there was no insanity in the voices I heard.

I thought hard, struggling against a rising sense of panic. Slowly, almost shyly, a tiny idea raised its head. I had a hypothesis. It was fantastic. Nevertheless, I decided to test it.

Next morning, I switched on the television. Once again, the picture on the tube didn't match the sounds. I heard the date being announced, and it was the twenty sixth of May. Hypothesis proved!

No matter how fantastic, it was probably true. My sense of hearing had extended four days and a couple of hours into the future.

First, I went into panic. Then, recovering, I quietly sat at my writing table for hours, mentally working out the ramifications of my condition. There were various things, big and small, to take care of. For instance, if someone rang the doorbell, I wouldn’t hear it. I had to have some kind of visual indication for it. Then there was the phone. This was one instrument that would become almost totally useless to me. And what about conversation with people? I could talk to them and they would hear me but when they talked, I would have heard it four days ago. How then to have a coherent conversation? The only solution was to tell everyone that I had gone totally deaf. Let them communicate with me via writing or sign language.

And life went on with all its strangeness.

*              

My pre-sonic condition had its advantages. I made it a habit of hearing the business news bulletins on the TV, and armed with advance knowledge of the market, I started playing the stocks. Inevitably my income became healthier and healthier. In turn, I became quite a philanthropist and had no end of fun.

No one knew about my abnormality till I heard himself telling my sweetheart about it and didn’t hear her scream or panic. So four days later, I did tell her about it and she, after a brief adjustment period, accepted it and said so in writing.

And one day, I wrote a note to her, asking her to marry me. She accepted and soon we became man and wife and lived happily for quite some time...

...till the time – yesterday - that I heard my wife crying with grief. And this grief was over my death.

I immediately got busy straightening out my things, preparing my will, loving and cherishing my wife.

Today, I heard my friends come to bury me.

And then my world went dead silent for some time.

And then I heard a terrible voice say: "Who is your God?"

And now I have three days to find the correct answer to that question.

THE END

I read Canadian news when American news becomes too much handle. It works for me, since often American news still gets coverage in Canada as having a crazy neighbor means you pay them extra attention. One day a news article popped up titled something unmemorable, like "More People Opting Not to Own Cars" or to that effect.

"Oh ho, the dapper Canadians are forgoing cars now, how ecofriendly of them," I think and proceed to browse the article. Only to discover, after several paragraphs, that the number of car sales in Canada has actually increased over the past few years -- a large, headline-killing fact skipped over and only mentioned as an aside.

Why? Because the author of the article recently gave up their own car, and so did their son, and then their friend...and therefore from their perspective "Wow, look at all these people opting not to own cars anymore, this must be a trend!"

If that Canadian article had only been published in, say, a tight urban center with myriad public transit options it might have been received better. As it was, the comment section (which in national Canadian news cannot be anonymous) was not kind.

I've made this same mistake myself when I think back on my personal experiences and then erroneously extrapolate them as great truths of the world. I grew up in a small farming community of 6000ish people - all white - and hence my experiences were limited. I didn't see things like racism because there weren't other races around. Our small town never suffered from rising rents or gentrification. No one in my school planned on going to college as most came from blue-collar families, so free college didn't make much difference to us. My bubble of the world, all in all, was pretty isolated from the issues raged about on the news.

Then my father lost his job - a common occurance in Ohio during the last great recession - and we had to move to California. Then suddenly all these issues made way more sense. My perspective had changed - not the actual status of the world.

Perspective is a dangerous, because it colors everything we do and how we prioritize the world around us. Too often people disregard things which don't directly impact them or their neighbors. Not living in a ghetto? Oh well for crime rates. Not living on the border? Oh well for immigration. Not dealing with police shootings in your community? Oh well for racial profiling. Not living on an island or the coast? Oh well for rising sea levels.

Any facts which fall outside the purview of our own lens of experience will not have as great an impact as facts which we can validate ourselves. This means that in a giant melting pot of different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, we lose common ground because we have forgotten the age old art of seeing things from a different perspective. What if you had to deal with this problem directly? What if you hadn't been born where you are now? What if you weren't the same sex/gender/race you are now? Would you have the same views? Would you feel the same way?

And honestly this call to arms should fall on us as writers because more than anything, we are the ones who present windows into the multifaceted perspectives across this planet. Ensuring that different perspectives are not only heard but brought to life and empathized with is the core of what good writing should do. Whether you write about your own perspective, or help someone who may not be gifted or confident enough to share their experiences with others, you should always strive to present not just facts but the perspectives behind them.

And if we want to ensure critical reading skills, we should always strive to identify the shortcomings in our own perspective lens - as well as the lens of those authors we read - and try to broaden it as much as possible.