Whole life perspective: looking at life in this big picture view.
What is life overall? What’s it about? Looking at my whole life and sort of imagining it from this perspective, zoomed out.
So I look at the idea of zooming in on life.
You can zoom in on time, on a specific moment, you’re focusing on a particular thing.
And in many ways, just the best way to be is just zoomed in on the present all the time.
I mean, that’s in many ways ideal.
But when we’re looking at planning, making a change in life, looking at our overall course in life, deciding what we want with life, it seems like it can be helpful to really zoom out and look at our life as sort of a big picture, as a whole.
So in this series, I look at different ways that we can approach a perspective on our whole lives.
What is it about? What are different ways of looking at our whole lives? So one way is the zoom notion, the idea of zooming in on this timeline, that we can sort of zoom out and sort of picture the timeline of our whole life being all in one.
What does that look like? Then there’s the idea of looking at life as a story.
Now, this is often a metaphor that is used.
We can look at our lives as being a story, where we are both the authors and also a character in them.
And this can also have limitations to it.
We sort of apply the rules of stories, as we imagine them, to real life.
And while it works to some degree, there’s also something lost in translation when we try to make our lives behave like stories.
Somehow, there’s a disconnect there.
Then there’s the whole idea of looking at the timeline in terms of present and future and past, and looking at how much do we focus on the present, and how do we look at the future? Are we holding back in life? Are we waiting for things to happen in the future? Do we have some notion about what the future might be? What do we feel is missing? That kind of nagging sense in the background that something’s not right, and we’re living in a way that’s not ideal, and that we’re somehow missing maybe part of our potential, or something that we want, or something that we sort of expect to come in the future somehow.
Then there’s the idea that life is a joke.
I mean, that’s one way to look at it, and in some ways it’s valid, that when we really zoom out and look at the really big picture, then life does seem kind of like something to not get too excited about, and that we should be able to laugh at it.
And this can be very powerful, and something that’s often missing in the world of self-development, because there’s a lot of very serious and earnest stuff about self-improvement.
It’s often missing that sense of humour about maybe the ultimate futility of things and just the lightness and silliness of life overall.
And yet, at the same time, there’s a limit to how far we can take that.
Because as long as we actually care about anything, we’re not going to be able to accept that life is a pure joke, or else we would just be OK with being killed because it’s all a joke.
We’re just OK with any horrible thing that happens, because it’s all funny.
So there is always a limit to how far we can take the notion of life being a joke.
And then there’s some other ideas that I look at, just different perspectives on how we can look at our lives.
Maybe we can look at our life as being multiple stories, multiple lives even.
And the whole notion of looking at life as being one piece, even though clearly, we’re all united by this- we’re living in this one body, this one connected timeline, I imagine, but somehow we can look at our life as being somehow bigger than just a single thing.
It can be multiple lives in one.
So all these together are different ways of looking at the idea of what is a life.
What is our life? How can we look at our life in a different way that makes us- maybe changes our mindset, changes the way we look at our day-to-day actions.
It seems like there’s a lot of flexibility in how we imagine what life is, and these are some of the ideas that I’ve had.
I’m very curious to hear other ideas and other perspectives.
I imagine there are ways of looking at what life is that just go an entirely different directions.
#wholelife #zoomoutonlife #bigpicture