Perspective: what do you see?

 Are you ever frustrated that you are always required to write essays for classes? Do you ever complain about a teacher for giving you too much homework? I can't argue because I am one of those self-centered people who fail to think about other people. Although it may seem like a lot of work on behalf of the student, can you imagine what it's like for a teacher to grade every single paper that their one hundred some students wrote? David Foster Wallace knocked some sense into me as an audience when he claims that people live in a little box full of themselves and fail to see the world outside of the thin walls. Incorporating the perspectives of other people into his speech he effectively displays how an individual is blind when considering the life of a fellow human being. He starts by showing his audience day in his shoes and how he can't help but feel infuriated by the long checkout line and how "[he couldn't] take [his] fury out on the frantic lady working the register" (Wallace). His day is not sunny with a chance of meatball so he goes about hating "all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas" (Wallace).

But when he decides not to let his default-setting take the best of him, he shows his audience that "it's not impossible" to step out of the box and open your eyes to the world around you. It's just like when Atticus Finch says "you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it” (To Kill a Mockingbird). Everyone preaches this theory because we don't live in alone on this planet, therefore there is no reason to believe that we are the center. Wallace's belief that people are self-centered is not a theory I reject because I'm sure many people feel like they are the center of the universe.
Wallace even says that "[he is] the absolute center of the universe" (Wallace). I'm sure that there are still a hand full of people who actually think that Earth is the center of this vast space, but guess what? We are not. We aren't even the center of our own solar system. There are thousands of solar systems in our galaxy and infinitely many galaxies in the universe. Compared to most of the planets and stars out there, we don't even make up a speck of dust. It's all perspective. How do you see things? Will you take the time and effort of step into a new realm? Will you look beyond the clouds and into the stars? What do you see?