Correct Focus on Situations

When I was a child we didn’t have toys like we do today, no Nintendo or Wii, we just had real simple toys and great imaginations. One of the best gifts I can remember was a large hand held magnifying glass. I discovered that if I lined the glass up just right with the sunshine I was able to burn a hole in a piece of paper. The main feature of the magnifying glass was the ability to enlarge whatever I wanted to look at and see so much more details that I couldn’t see clearly without using it. Magnification didn’t make the object any bigger than it actually was, but it greatly enlarged my view, and that allowed me to see details that were hidden from my normal view.

Generally a magnifying glass is a good tool, but like so many tools, it can also become part of a problem. Sometimes our lives become like looking thru a magnifying glass and our problems or circumstances seem so big and overpowering that they block our view and become all are able see. Our problems seem to reduce the size and power of everything else around us and if we don’t take a step back from that magnifying glass view everything will be out of proportion and then we all seem to get lost occasionally.

Perspective is another great tool that is available to every one of us to help keep the magnification view of our current situation in its proper place. Some folks may call it exaggeration, but I generally see it more as a different perspective problem with the limited view of the current “lens” that we are using at that moment. It is at these times that we all need to stop, take a breath or maybe even a break, and relax before we attempt to refocus on the situation at hand. After our break somehow the “lens” of our magnifier glass view goes away and we can see our current situation or problem much more clearly.

A real world example of this could be the over reaction to a problem that pops up during the day and is urgent enough to require immediate action (or so it seems anyway) so we study and view it as best we can and rush to make a decision, which in my case, is usually wrong. I have had to teach myself to stop and think about that situation in terms of what it may mean in 3 weeks or maybe 3 months or years from now. When I do that I tend to lose the distorting lens view and see the situation more clearly.

I still like the magnifying glass approach when I have a splinter in my finger, but I choose to not attack that situation with a butcher knife to cut off the finger just because the magnification lens shows the splinter as a log. Some things in our daily lives need that slower pace of years gone by so that we can make better choices for the future.

Steve