Through A Tourist's Eyes

My parents have been visiting me this week. Actually, we spent most of their travel time in Denmark and they are in Turku for a grand total of 48 hours. It is a very, very short visit.

Visitors, I am finding, bring new perspectives to what has now become routine and normal. My parents have been noticing things that I never saw before. Like the brushes that are outside some of the stores for people to wipe their shoes on before coming inside. Or the amount of tulips that are in bloom everywhere (my mother loves flowers and they’re always the first thing she notices).

One of my father's many pictures

They are taking pictures of birdhouses, of streets that I pass every day without a second glance, of the trees around the Student Village. They are calling attention to how far things really are (I made them walk a lot but they were troopers and did it without complaint). Their appreciation for Turku far exceeded my own while we were walking along the river and enjoying the warm spring day.

The funny thing is, I was in their shoes not too long ago. When I first came to Turku I saw how charming the cobbled streets were (but also how difficult they were to walk on). I noticed adorable street signs and the beautiful facades of some of the buildings. I was falling in love with the bridges crossing the Aura River and loving the number of trees everywhere.

A sign in a museum

Now when I walk outside I don’t pay that much attention to my surroundings. My attention is on getting to where I need to go or accomplishing the task at hand. Many of the things my parents have been pointing out were things I noticed but never gave much attention to. Some, however, I didn’t notice until they pointed them out.

As a child, my dad would tell my brother and I stories all the time during dinner. Sometimes, he told stories of movies my parents had watched but we were too young to see. Sometimes he told fables. One of his favorites was the story of the blind men and the elephant.

This is a story that you may have heard before. But in case you haven’t it is about several blind men (the exact number varied from telling to telling) who encounter an elephant for the first time. Each man touches a different part of the elephant to figure out what the animal is like. One touches the tail and says it is like a rope. Another touches the body and says it is a wall. Another the legs and says it is like a tree trunk.

An area I walk by everyday but never thought to take a picture of

And so this story shows how we can all have multiple perspectives that are very different but are all true though not the whole truth. It is only when we combine these truths together that we get the complete picture of the elephant.

Seeing multiple perspectives, or Anekanta, is a key tenant of Jainism. Recognizing that there are many ways of seeing the same thing is one of the ways we can begin to shed our karma that builds up around our soul through our thoughts, actions and desires. It is also one that I think people in general have an increasingly difficult time achieving.

While talking to a Jain friend today about Anekanta, she commented that there would be no fighting if people could see the way the other side perceives things. She was probably right but I also don’t see most of us getting there any time soon. Till then though, I will try to learn to see the city I live in through the eyes of a tourist.