Perspective can change your life
- col-teri-stein
- July 1, 2018
- 1389
Sometimes life is just a matter of perspective. It always pays to put yourself in another’s shoes or their small, warty bodies with tiny toad feet.
Each spring I would look in the window well on the east side of our home and marvel at the fact each year some toads would choose to make their home there. I thought it must be a safe, comfortable place for them. Then my husband Joe commented that they probably fell in and couldn’t get out due to the slick metal sides of the window well.
Oh. Well, that was an eye-opening perspective change.
After that revelation my focus became toad rescue, but I didn’t want to touch the toads. I enlisted the help of my nephew Seth, who was about 6 years old at the time and didn’t mind picking up toads.
The first rescue didn’t go so well. I watched in horror when Seth, as if slow pitching a ball underhanded, heaved a toad into the dense greenery behind our home.
“You have to be gentle with them,” I instructed.
“I tossed it gently,” Seth reasoned, but later I observed him as he gently released more toads into the wild with their tiny toad feet on the ground.
This spring I kept checking the window wells for weeks. No toads. Could it be this was the year they avoided imprisonment in the window well?
Then one day after we had a bad storm the night before, there they were. A large toad and a smaller one were trapped in the window well. I also could see holes where they had burrowed in the dirt.
What to do?
Seth was not available to assist in a rescue. Grabbing a nearby piece of firewood, I gently positioned it in the window well, hoping the toads would take the opportunity to climb out and free themselves. The firewood was at a pretty steep angle, so I wasn’t sure it would work.
I kept checking for the next few minutes, but the toads had not moved. Finally after a half hour, Joe, who had been working in the garage, alerted me to the fact that the large toad was now sitting on top of the firewood. I tiptoed close to take a look.
The large toad seemed to be enjoying himself. He was looking around and taking in the landscape, probably wondering what his next move should be. About 20 minutes later I noticed he was now sitting in the lush grass a couple feet away by the chimney. Yes, he was really going to do it.
He was escaping a boring life in the window well. He took a chance, and it was paying off.
The large toad’s perspective was changing. An hour later I checked the last spot I saw him at, and he was gone, on to a better toad life, I hoped.
The little toad was still in the window well. It must have taken him awhile to work up his courage or figure out that the firewood was the path to a better life. The next morning the little toad was gone too.
It’s been weeks, and the toads have not returned. Still, the firewood remains in the window well to give hope and a way out to the next poor, hapless toad that falls in the evil trap of the window well.
Perspective. How can it change your life?