From the Remerton water tower, everything familiar looked different.
The things I saw everyday – Baytree Place, Plum Street, the old Mill House, the grocery store, Baytree Road, the cars, the buildings, everything – looked different from that height.
I needed the occasional climb up the water tower when I was younger. The change of height reminded me of my home faraway.
West Virginia is called the “Mountain State” for a reason. It’s full of mountains and hills. That’s where I grew up and spent the first quarter century of my life.
My family home sat on a small plateau of a hill. Parking on the roadside, you could see the house from the bottom of the hill. Climbing the driveway and some steps, you’d be level with the house. Walk up the hillside in the “backyard,” you’d see the rooftops of ours and all of the neighboring houses.
By taking a few steps, the perspective changed. Something familiar looked different.
In South Georgia, the majority of the land is flat. This isn’t a complaint. I love it here. Lived here for 30-plus years and counting. Met my wife, raised a family, spent a career here. But the perspective is often the same everyday from every way.
When I was younger, when the career was still mostly new, before my wife and kids, and age and responsibility, I frequently climbed the fence surrounding the area where the old Remerton water tower loomed.
As I remember it, the old water tower had four supports. Metal struts crisscrossed the sides of each support so a person could climb it like crooked rungs on a ladder.
Sometimes, other folks joined me. They usually climbed all the way to the top of the tower. I was never interested in climbing to the top. My climbs weren’t about daring the heights. They were about changing my height. I usually stopped at the level of the first horizontal bars about 50 feet up. That’s a guess. My climbs weren’t about exact measurements of height either.
No. I climbed to change my perspective.
To get a different view of the everyday things.
No need to climb to the top of the water tower to do that. You didn’t have to go “all in” to get a different perspective.
Maybe we need a little more of that in our lives now. A change of perspective when it comes to one another.
We often hear different views – social, political, cultural, etc. – than our own but we don’t really listen to them. We’re so used to our view, we don’t want to look at something from any other perspective. Not even part way. Going part way doesn’t mean you have to go “all in” on a view that differs from yours.
It just means that something familiar looks a little different. Or better still, something different looks a little familiar.
A short climb requires a bit of risk – it can be scary – but a different perspective awaits if we try seeing something from the other person’s viewpoint. A little understanding of seeing something from a different angle than the view we see everyday could give us a better overall picture.
The old Remerton water tower is gone. Has been for years. And even if it was still there, I’m not advocating climbing a literal water tower to the top or even as high as 50 feet or even setting foot on the first crooked rung.
Still, maybe we all need to climb a figurative water tower now and again, just for even a temporary change of view. Just to realize we’re all looking at the same thing but from different perspectives.