Life can become ever more complicated the further we are on its journey. Sometimes it feels like going down the rabbit hole, where your every situation starts to seem like a mess and overall, you feel directionless.
Yes, we all feel that confusion from time to time. Even the people who we think are rich or have it all ‘figured out’ go through all this because life is like a pair of earphones. It just tangles up somehow and spares no one!
The scariest feeling, at least to me, is feeling lost and having no sense of the overall direction, life is leading me. I am sure many of you can relate to this as well.
In times such as those, I try to step back, take a breather, and look at the big picture. Sometimes you need to look at life from a larger perspective, that gets lost in the humdrum of everything.
The Big Picture
Sometimes I really feel like we human beings are crazy. We often get demotivated even if we are doing things we are passionate about, we get scared easy at the sight of unfamiliar territory, we forget why we are doing things in the first place, and we get so busy with the little things that we forget to see the big picture.
Only when you are able to perceive things on the larger scale, can you get the overall direction of anything. Only then will things make sense because then you have all the information you need to take a calculated decision and not live life on a whim.
Consider the big picture as your map with the help of which you are navigating the ship of your life. Your intelligence is your compass and you are responsible for making use of the map to reach the destination.
People like Steve Jobs had an innate ability to see the bigger picture in life, and look at what they achieved. And that can happen only when you take a step back, and actually look.
Moral From A Childhood Story
My mother used to tell me a story when I was a child that really inculcated this habit in me that is so important. The story was about a group of blind men and an elephant which is a popular parable in the Indian subcontinent.
Basically, a group of blind men who have never seen an elephant come across one, someday and they each touch the different parts of the elephant to make sense of what it is like.
One man touches the side of the elephant and concludes that the elephant is like a wall. Another touches its tusk and says that it is like a spear. Yet another touches its trunk and says that it is like a snake. Another one of them touches its leg and says that it is like a tree.
The moral here is that each of those men had partial information based on which they were trying to figure out what an elephant looked like. That is not how its to be done at all. One needs to have all the information, the big picture, to make sense of anything in life.