Reflection 6 – How Does Adopting a Bird’s Eye-View Change your Perspective?Reflection #06 –

Barcelona is very well – known for its special grid urban design with blocks all over the city along with its orthogonal streets. Now, close your eyes and imagine a small kid crying to his mom because his ice cream just fell on the ground. Pretty upsetting! Now imagine you have a drone and you begin to zoom out and in the street behind you (the orthogonal street you normally wouldn’t see), a man just got hit by a car and is soaking in his blood on the ground. Even more upsetting!! Let’s zoom again with our professional drone and we can see now an entire building on fire and people jumping from windows trying to avoid the blazing fire. Even more and more upsetting!!! Remember the kid with the ice cream. Do you still sympathize with him? Probably yes! But isn’t your feeling diminishing the more you zoomed out. This is how ALS changed my perspective of things. Adopting this bird’s eye-view changed how I saw everything around me.

October 2017. I recently joined the American University in Cairo (AUC) in their Political Science Department after leaving Qatar University. Classes at AUC are half in size or maybe even less, I have my personal teaching assistant (TA); something I missed in my previous job to a large extent. My TA was a bright young lady, who has completed her BA and was now pursuing her MA at the same department. Ironically enough she TA’ed with me two courses and was my student in a third MA class. At that time still, my official ALS diagnosis wasn’t confirmed yet but there was very strong evidence hinting to it after seeing couple of neurologists in Egypt. So you can imagine how I felt as I can only see my life falling apart and my future coming to a sudden and near end. As I am sitting in my office preparing for my MA class and being at a very point, my TA walks into my office full of tears crying and shouting complaining about her presentation grade. She received 4.5/5 and couldn’t understand how she did not get the full grade like her other group member. I tried to explain to her in every possible way the reasoning behind her grade but with no luck. She left my office same was as she entered; crying and shouting! Deep down inside I was furious! On the one hand, I’m dealing with the most shocking and ugly news of my life and this poor young lady is crying herself out for half a point!!

At this time and afterwards, I began realizing the importance of adopting this bird’s eye view. The more one is concerned with their own daily stuff, one feels they are dealing with the most pressing issues in the world. The moment they zoom out, life starts to change for better or worse! ALS taught me to adopt this grandiose view. My work, publications and other stuff began to take a backseat and I got more concerned with other stuff. My priorities began to change accordingly. This event reminded me with what I used to do back in Irvine during my PhD when I hit my low points. Nearby my apartment there was a relatively small mountain that I used to hike. The moment I would reach the top and started looking down, everything would seem different. Stuff such as cars, homes, and schools that moments ago seemed too big, start to

dwindle in your eyes. That was a lesson learned! It’s all about perspective and how one decides to view things.

Now back to our small kid with his ice cream in Barcelona