Get a perspective!

Get a perspective!

© 2015 Scott Wilson

 

"Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot." – Charlie Chaplin

 

As we navigate this thing called life we will routinely encounter both joys and sorrows. Goals will be thwarted.  Dreams will meet with difficulties.  Steps in the correct direction towards self-improvement will seem to stall and fail.  How we choose to deal with these events will literally make the difference between genuine success and failure.

 

If these events were simply logical matters we would all naturally resolve them in a dispassionate way.   Unfortunately, despite our beliefs to the contrary, we are not truly driven by rational thinking.  We are emotional creatures and emotions tend to drive thinking and trump our best intentions.  Emotions are the elements that turn easy tasks arduous and dreary work into joy.  When we simply try to mentally suppress our emotions we inevitably cause them to build in intensity until they overcome our control.  So we need to understand what factors affect our emotions.

 

One of the most powerful influences on our emotions is our perspective.  Fortunately, perspective is also a variable that we can greatly influence with our rationale minds.  Our minds can gain a measure of control over our emotions if we are willing to understand how our emotions are affected by our perceptions of the things and events around us.

 

To explain the power of perception and emotions allow me to use the extreme illustration of a phobia.  Arachnophobia is the extreme fear of spiders.  I have seen grown men and women jumping up on chairs and leaping great distances to evade the approach of a harmless house spider.  This tiny delicate creature that could easily be smashed by even the smallest toddler has the power to hurl an over 150 pound human being across a room.  Amazing.

 

Why does this happen?  Because the people affected by the phobia perceive the spider as a far greater threat than it is in reality.  Phobias are usually overcome by gradually changing the person’s perspective towards the object of their fear.  By repeated exposure the individuals come to realize that the objects of their fear are not truly threatening to them.  For the arachnophobic people, they come to see spiders for the delicate and benign creatures that they are.

 

This understanding can help us with our own difficulties.  I often see people developing a great deal of stress about what someone said or did to them or about some personal failure.  We tend to internalize these external stressors and then exaggerate their implications.  A person who is trying to lose weight succumbs to temptation and overeats on a weekend and then beats themselves up for the rest of the week.  Or worse, they contemplate quitting their efforts to improve their health.  We do this because we have lost perspective on parts of our lives and enable our emotions to overcome us.

 

I have a simple solution for such events.  I close my eyes and take a deep breath.  When I let out the breath slowly I try to imagine how I will perceive this difficulty tomorrow.  I then imagine how this problem will look in a week.  From there I move to a month and then a year.  Beyond that I seek to imagine the trouble from 5 and 10 years away.  Lastly, I imagine this matter from the perspective of my deathbed.  When I return from my time-travelling I ask myself “How was it?”  Based on my answers at the various times I respond accordingly.

 

Obviously I want to extend significant effort to those things that will have an impact on me when I am in my final moments.  However, I rarely find that any of my troubles seem to look all that bad beyond a day or a week.  What happened to the emotions and the trauma of the event that I am dealing with?  They are now tempered by the proper perspective of the situation.  If something will be forgettable or insignificant in less than a year then why would we want to give it so much of our hearts and our minds today?

 

This is only one exercise.  My point is that we can use our imagination and our minds to change our perspective on virtually anything from weight loss to a difficult spouse or from a troubled child to a bad job situation.  Perspective will not absolve us of the need to take action but it will help to relieve us of much of the fear and anger that might cloud our best response.

So if something is troubling you today then take a few quiet moments to honestly and creatively look at your problem from some new and different perspectives. You could discover that it is not nearly as bad as you thought or you might even find some solutions that you never considered before!