Perspective and Joy

Feeling bluesy? Stop reacting, start responding. There's what's out there and what's right here. We get to believing that everything out there is right next door and end up spending all our time planning for miseries that often never arrive. After awhile we stop looking anywhere but out there and lose the critical perspective that tells us what is just too far away to ever spill into our daily lives.

TV and the Web, our main tools for keeping track of whats out there, actually work to destroy this critical perspective. By making everything, regardless of how local or distant, seem immediate and right-here-right now! the actual distance and locality of most events is compressed right into our very homes. But everything is not immediate. Should we re-time the traffic lights in Seattle because arterials are clogged in Atlanta? Of course not. But what's news in Atlanta is right there next to what's news in Seattle. The 4000 miles of towns and communities and counties and states that separate the two and are the measures of our perspective aren't even a part of the equation, and that's the part that's the most important.

You have to work to put that perspective back in place, then some of the right-here-right-now miseries start dropping back into the distance where they belong. Once you release the false immediacy of things, once you stop reacting, there's all kinds of time to look around and see how many of the world's problems haven't done anything at all to your home, family and real life, and how much of the comfort and security you've been working so hard to keep up is right there, intact.

It's hard to not feel a little joy when you get a look at how well you've actually been doing.

OK. I'm done.

Peace,
Robert