My sister, Susan was brilliant, with 2 PhD’s, language ability in English and French and Academic Tenure at the university where she taught, and she took her own life by having a living will, admitting herself to Hospice and refusing to eat or drink until she died. That is meaning it. It is also having desire and expectations for life that are unmet on every level. Now, I have to say that there is a lot more that I will not miss about my life than I will miss, but I won’t miss it to the extent that I have to hurry my departure before it gets worse.
Susan and I looked at things differently. We had different perceptions, different perspectives. Perspective is everything. How we see what we look at makes all the difference. And what something we look at means to us determines, or strongly influences, what we do about what we see. The meanings we ascribe to the things in our lives, run and, perhaps, ruin, our life when we think that the way we see things is the way things are.
And the moral to this story is that we have to see our seeing, walk around it, sit with it, look it over from every angle until we can see the way we are seeing as the way it is and also is. When we examine the impact of our life. upon us, we are examining the impact of the way we see things and the meaning the way we see things has upon us. Changing the way we see things just by seeing the way we see things, changes the meaning life has for us, changes the way we live, changes life. Perspective is everything. As our perspective shifts, our life shifts with it. It is worth our time to sit with what we think we see until we can see our seeing and what impact it is having on the way we live (And how much in the way of drugs and alcohol we consume).
Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy 