Sitting with a cup of vanilla cream coffee, I breathed in a huge gulp of the fresh, clean air and tried to drink in the magnitude of the scene before me.
At 9,300 feet in the Colorado night, the stars seemed almost within reach, a sparkling blanket of shimmering brilliance flung across the sky, illuminating the mountain peak towering just across the lake.
It all made me feel very small.
Concerns of the daily life I lead hundreds of miles away seemed even smaller than me. In the presence of such awesomeness, I could hardly even remember what they were.
Strange, I thought, how problems which only a week before seemed bigger than me were now so insignificant. What had happened?
Perspective. That’s what happened. The problems would still be awaiting my return to the daily grind. Nothing in my life had actually changed, just my vantage point.
We all at times feel overwhelmed by work, family obligations, financial problems. We can easily focus all of our energies trying to make our problems go away, when a simpler solution is to simply change our perspective.
When we view a map on a computer, there’s that little magnifying glass that allows us to either zoom in and make the location bigger or zoom out to see where we are going fits into the bigger picture. Our minds have a similar capacity.
We can zoom in and magnify our daily problems, making them seem insurmountable, or we can choose to zoom out and place the worries of the moment in the context of the bigger picture of our lives. We can put them in a new perspective.
Try it. When you put your current troubles in the big picture of your life, perhaps you will see it is hard to even remember problems that just a year ago seemed to dominate you. Perhaps you will see a broad view of your life and realize that you have encountered many problems before and you actually have a track record of success. You might realize that whatever you are worrying about today will soon be a blip you hardly notice as you look in the rearview mirror.
Perhaps you will choose to change your perspective.
