Have you ever had the experience when something that has been extremely familiar to you suddenly appear foreign and just… wrong? Happened to me recently. While starting the day early one morning in the city, for some reason the letters “ONE” on this building caught my eye and I took a snapshot. When I was trying to crop & frame the photo, I zoomed in more & more and all of a sudden, those 3 simple letters made no sense to me! I knew they still said O-N-E but for a moment I was having serious doubts that it was the correct way of spelling out the number 1!
Also that morning, the meditation track I had on invited me to practice taking the usual internal focus and slowly expand that focus and radiate out as far as possible. In the quiet of the city morning, I scanned around & took in what was around me and tried to zoom out further and higher. I was genuinely surprised at how incredibly hard it was to get my mind to go from street level to that elevated view! Apparently, I may know the close up view really well and I may also know the aerial view (thanks to Google maps) but I really had little experience with what the in-between looks like.
Finding and working on meaningful things usually requires taking on someone else’s perspectives. I’m reminded that if I get too comfortable with my set of realities, I may not recognize the solution when I need to zoom in and I may have trouble zooming out when I need to get everyone to the big picture. I’m just grateful that I get a lot of practice with this in the work we do with our partners!
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