Have you ever thought of how important role our perspective plays to the way we conceive, appreciate and feel things? Have you ever thought of how big of a difference a mere change of an angle or a distance could do to our understanding and feelings? Indeed, as Wayner Dyer once said, “if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”.
Changing the distance:
Try to imagine this: sitting on a window seat in an airplane and as it starts ascending you look out of the window. At the beginning everything on the ground seems big and this make you feel that they are important, yet as you start ascending higher up everything starts becoming smaller and trivial. Yet, in reality nothing has changed. The cars, the buildings, the people, everything on the ground has stayed the same, yet still as you look at them from that airplane window, they keep shrinking. What has indeed changed is your perspective towards them. Now, as your rise higher up in the sky, all those large buildings on the grounds are starting to vanish and the clouds, which while being on the ground used to be immaterial, have now gained a special place in your optical sight and subsequently into your life.
This is exactly what happens with life. The more you focus on a thought, a person or a situation the more significant it becomes into your mind. However, if you decide to get some distance from them you may realize that the things that you used to care so much and consume so much energy about may in reality be trivial. Indeed, zooming out of those things will enable you to look at the wider picture and end up seeing other things that may be much more important and much more exciting than what you used to believe.
Changing the angle:
Now try to imagine being an artistic trying to draw a vase from a certain angle. Even the slightest change of your angle will give you a different perspective of the vase and this will result to a different sketch from the initial one. This does not mean that the vase as an object has actually changed, yet your understanding of how the vase looks like has varied depending on your viewpoint.
The same happens in life. You may often have a constant factor that you may not like and in fact you may not have the power to change it. Yet, you have the power to determine the angle at which you will look at it from. A change of an angle may introduce you to the brighter side of an otherwise unfortunate situation. The angle from which you decide to look at things will often determine your feelings. If you chose to look at the “negative angle” of a situation it will make you desperate and sad, yet there is always a brighter side to look at things. So do chose your angle wisely!
Until the next next time
keep pondering
xoxo
Jo