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Putting Things Into Perspective

Putting Things Into Perspective

Yuk! Another Monday morning. Time to go to work. Your weekend was, once again, far too short to do everything you wanted to do. Not enough time to rest, not enough time to play, not enough time to get organized for the upcoming week. Then there’s Monday morning traffic to face – aggressive drivers cutting you off, hot Arizona sun beating down on you, and motorists talking on cellphones, drifting from lane to lane. Arrgh! Enough to make you scream, right?

Time to put things into perspective! Whenever you are feeling overwhelmed and feeling sorry for yourself, and feeling angry at the world and everything in it, that’s the perfect time to stop and put things into perspective. Putting things into perspective means comparing something to something else, in order to get at the true nature of the things. For example, is a turtle large or small? Depends on what you’re comparing it to. It’s very large compared to a ladybug, but very small compared to a horse.

We’re all too quick to compare what we’ve got to something better and find ourselves lacking. Our house is smaller than our co-worker’s house, our lawn is not as neatly landscaped as the neighbor’s, our children are not as talented as our sisters’, our job doesn’t pay as much as our best friends’ and we certainly don’t have a nice pool like our cousin does. Then we start feeling sorry for ourselves, we pity our pathetic life and we start feeling down and depressed, or maybe jealous, angry, or resentful. Not fun!

Instead, we need to put things into perspective in the other direction. We need to compare the fact that we own our home to the fact that many people don’t own a home and are living in apartments or sharing homes with other families. When we look at our children, we need to glory in the fact that they are healthy and happy and remember that lots of families lose children every year to terrible accidents. When we look at our paycheck, we must thank heavens that we have a job that allows us to provide for ourselves and our family members and that we are not on public assistance or living in a country where we cannot find any suitable employment.

When things are really seeming bad to you, I strongly encourage you to imagine yourself in the exact same condition, but with a handicapping condition, like blindness, paralysis, or deafness. Then see if you can feel sorry for yourself. You at least have your senses and the ability to move around. There are many others who don’t. And, of course, when the blind and the deaf get to feeling sorry for themselves, I would encourage them to be thankful they don’t have cancer or an alcoholic father or that they don’t have to deal with Monday morning traffic.

It’s all relative. You can have a great day or a rotten day, it’s entirely up to you. Put things into perspective when you start feeling negatively!

Posted on July 13, 2005