Growing Your Perspective

When I was in college, many moons ago, I had the opportunity to climb Giant Mountain, the twelfth highest peak in the Adirondacks.

I remember very little about that adventure except that the climb took a few hours, I sweated a lot, and there were plenty of rocks.

And then, that spectacular view!

I had no idea from the beginning of the trail at the bottom how amazing the view from the top would be. It only took a few hours of climbing to totally change my perspective.

Unless you have a house built on the rock outcropping of a mountain in a spectacular mountain range, this isn’t a sight the average guy gets to see every day. Life is sort of like that, too. You start at the bottom. As you climb, life can become a struggle. You sweat a lot. There’s a lot of stuff in the way: trees and brush and long stretches of barren rock.

You look for ways around them, for shortcuts, or even a longer way that’s not so hard. Eventually, you decide to just get climbing.

You catch a glimpse here and there of the view and it helps to keep you going.

When you get to the top-the end of your life-you want that spectacular view.

In order to get that, your perspective has to grow.

As babies, we have one perspective: I need. We are the center of the universe and when we cry, someone shows up to take care of the dirty diaper, the nine o’clock feeding, the burping we so desperately need.

However, if we want to live well, grow, and enjoy all life has to offer, our perspective must grow too.

Life is a journey from being the ‘center of the universe’ as a child, to discovering the universe as we grow, to growing into our place in the universe as we age.

Hopefully, at some point, we own our place and live in it as fully as we can.

The lessons we learn, the people we meet, the experiences we have, all contribute to the change in perspective that we need to be the best and happiest we can be.

Everyone experiences these changes at different times in their lives, and sometimes it takes several similar experiences to learn the lesson that will ultimately change our perspective for the better.

In the next few weeks, I’d like to have a conversation about the experiences we have that change our lives by changing our perspectives, and how we can gain perspective by creating the experiences we need. I’d love it if you joined the conversation.

~~~

I will be off next week for the Easter holiday, so I wish you all a happy and blessed Easter. ❤️❤️❤️