If You Could Zoom In On Your Life

If You Could Zoom In On Your Life

If you could take a photo of your life today and then zoom in on something special or important which part of your life would you choose? Would it be something that upsets you or something that brings a smile to your face?

If your photo was a movie, would you like the positive experience to continue or do you wish the negative experience had never happened? If you could relive this part of your life again, would you? If not, why wouldn’t you?

Imagining your life as a movie or a photo is a good way of examining your life and the things in it you like and the things that you do not. When you give important life experiences a focus, you can examine the important events that have shaped your life and especially those ones that continue to influence you today.

Have you ever noticed when you take a wide angled picture you see a lot of things but very little detail and when you zoom in on one part of the picture you miss out on the big picture. Zooming in is great when you want to see details, but what are you now missing?

We often look at life like this. We look at the big picture and forget the details that bring beauty and interest to our lives, or we focus on one thing and forget the bigger picture. Either way, we risk losing our perspective if we only look at life through a wide angle or from a zoomed lens. We need both perspectives to understand our life experiences and that is the purpose for understanding each experience.

Revisit your memory again and rethink the situation you were thinking of earlier. How different does the picture look close-up and how does it look from a distance. If the picture is upsetting close-up, zoom out and look at the picture from a wide angle. What do you see? Are there other things happening that you might have missed at first?

When we focus on negative things in our lives, we tend to feel hurt and upset, but when we see it as part of a bigger picture, we can deal with it and even learn something important from it. We also can not just focus on the positives in our lives, because then we are only living in a fantasy world. Our lives need to have a balance in them for us to truly understand how positive and negative feelings affect us.

You will always have positive and negative events occur in your life, so try to understand why each experience affected you the way that it did. For example; you may see a piece of art that makes you sad, but the person next to you sees it and smiles. What did they see that you didn’t and vice versa?

We are all different and we interpret things differently which is what makes us unique. Knowing and believing that you are unique will allow you to understand that not every experience that you have in life is experienced the same by others and that is why you need to look at each experience from both a wide angle and a close up.