People say that “life is busy”, but I like to say “life is full of life”. We no longer live in small villages where you can walk to everything, are fairly self-sufficient, live by the seasons, and rarely go more than 20 miles in any direction. We live in communities which are separate from our work, travel to events, travel to our families, from whom we live either minutes or hours apart, and all of our interests take us in a million directions at once. Just getting through a day is a physics project of figuring out what happens when and how. As a friend of mine once said, “I have so much in my head, if I add one more thing, I think breathing will fall out and then that will be the end of me.”
So with all of this taking up our attention, it’s not surprising when life changing events surprise us. It’ s not like we have time to look up and see the train coming, even if we might have been able to. We react to the crash, survey the damage, heal and repair, shake our heads at the vagaries of fate, and keep going. And, to be honest, it feels safe to live this way. If we’re driving the car that gets us from this thing to the next thing to the next thing, then we are in control, right? And traffic is a known entity that we are skilled at navigating for the most part.
But what if we stopped for a moment and looked up from the have to’s of the moment. What if we looked at the bigger picture? At the ‘why’ that is pushing us to do all these little things? Well, that’s scary because it feels more secure and safe to have someone or something else responsible for the big decisions. Let it be fate or coincidence or karma that causes things to happen, right? You’re just along for the ride and Life is in control. But what if you stopped for just a moment and looked up? You have the ability at any time to look above the day-to-day and see the bigger picture. Wouldn’t it be cool to take a helicopter ride above the business of your own life and see it all layed out before you? I can tell you I enjoy it. The view is spectacular. And, unlike real helicopters rides, it doesn’t make me nauseous. 🙂