Perspective

When I was in college I liked a boy who like a friend of mine. It felt catastrophic. I was convinced that my friend would marry this boy and I would remain sad and alone with a front row seat to their romance, forever pining for my one true love.

Feel free to gag.

Fast forward a year and I never even talked to the boy anymore, or missed talking to him, or even thought about talking to him. Neither did the friend whom he had liked. Fast forward five years and I was happily dating the man I would one day marry. I hadn’t thought of the boy I once thought was my “one true love” in years. Keep fast forwarding, and the reality of my adult life is nothing like I imagined it would be in that sad space I lived in for a few weeks in my early days of college.

It’s kind of a funny example, but it is such a clear picture to me of how time and distance changes our perspective on things.

When we are in the midst of something, be it a season of life, a struggle, or a loss, we can only see it up close. We can’t get a clear picture of what that time or event will look like within the broader context of our life. We can’t know what it will mean to us or how we will understand it. To use the cliché, we can’t see the forest for the trees.

The dangerous element is that we think we can. We believe that a tree is the whole forest. We think that the way we interpret and understand our current reality is the way that we will understand and interpret it forever. But that completely discounts the wisdom and insight that time and space provide.

It's like looking at an intricate and beautiful painting with your nose pressed up against it. From that perspective, all you can see is brush strokes. There’s no cohesive whole, no flow to the coloring and structure of the painting. From that perspective you can’t even tell what you are looking at. But when you take a step back, you can see a little more. Take a few steps back and you can see even more. Keep walking and you can see not just the whole painting, but the context of the entire exhibit.

When we are in the middle of something, we cannot see the fullness of its meaning for our life. All we can see are the thoughts and feelings we have about it right now, in the present moment. And those thoughts and feelings matter. They matter a great deal. We need to process and care for those thoughts and feelings in the healthiest, most whole-hearted way that we can.

But we also need to recognize that those thoughts and feelings will change. How much emphasis we put on this event or experience will change. What it means to us and how we tell the story will change significantly. We need to hold those thoughts and feelings loosely, and give them the freedom and space to grow and change as we grow and change and gain insight and understanding.

We need to remember that this illness, this conflict, this anxiety, this difficult season, is not the end of the story. It’s all we can see right now, but it is not the whole picture. Sometimes, we need to take a step back.

If I had been right, if that boy in college had been my “one true love,” then that story would’ve been a very sad one. But with perspective, I can see that that relationship and moment was not even a chapter in my story; it was maybe a short sentence, if that. The fuller story is actually one that I love and treasure and enjoy. I am so grateful for the shifting perspective that time and life give us.

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