“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses,” Abraham Lincoln once said. It’s all a matter of perspective.

We all know this, yet we approach life with the same outlook everyday because it’s comfortable. But comfort is often an excuse for ignorance, and also breeds boredom.

As we near the end of the year, I challenge you to shatter your trite glasses and try on a variety of new lenses. I promise the world will look different.

Classes, homework, tests…thorns, thorns, thorns… The last quarter of the school year is always a hectic sprint, the last 100 yards before the glorious sun-soaked days. As a junior attempting to complete standardized testing, it can feel more like a sprint filled with hurdles.

Our usual response is to obsess over the negative aspects, driving a cycle of self-pity and stress. I am certainly guilty of this, often casting a shadow over my day even before I have shouldered my backpack —but I am determined to change this.

Of course complaining is a satisfying antidote to everyday burdens, but it is ineffective. Complaints are like the quintessential “how are you?” greeting, where the answer is even emptier than the question. So discard those complaining lenses, and take a moment to find new ones.

Try the long-term vision glasses: in 10, 20, 50 years from now, how much will this one grade matter to you? You probably won’t even remember it. Or how about the chic “learning for the sake of learning” spectacles? Sure, classes can be dull, but often times your approach is the root cause of that. I used to predetermine which subjects I disliked and completely disregard those classes. Time would slow to a snail-like pace in those classes, and I would feel drained even though I did nothing. I realized that the more questions I asked and the more I interacted with my classmates, the more worthwhile school felt.

Rest assured that we are all experts at spotting flaws. It’s almost as if there were an undiscovered area on the visible light spectrum, next to violet, called “flaws.” Our common mindset is to take something beautiful and degrade it by finding a fault. We then turn this narrow mindset into our singular perspective in regards not only to school, but other humans.

So often I hear groans about the monotony of going to school with the same people since elementary school. But again, instead of moaning I encourage you to look at it from a different angle.

There are more than 800 kids at our school, and every single person has a fascinating story.

I was stunned when I did my first interview for journalism and realized that there are millions of unique tales out there that I wasn’t aware of. Your assumptions about someone, whether positive or negative, tell more about you than the actual person.

Most of us have known our classmates since elementary school, but that does not validate our assumptions. Instead, it allows us to acknowledge each other’s growth.

Quit the eye-rolling about the boring people in your grade, and start complaining about how many people you still have to get to know. After all, you only have a couple years together.

Discovering new perspectives is always shocking, but not in a negative way. It is not easy to step out of the comfortably narrow mindset that we tend to stick to, but the resulting benefits definitely outweigh the initial discomfort. Once your horizon widens, so does your compassion and wisdom.

Take a breath. There are so many great aspects of the world surrounding you — you’re just too caught up avoiding the thorns to notice the roses.