I didn’t exactly realize this until the other night, after several glasses of wine, when I was trying to console one of my students who had become stressed with work.  In brief, she was focused on all the frustrating things in her life and was generally avoiding taking account of all the good ‘stuff’ that was going on.  So, like a good ‘big brother’, I reminded her that some large percentage of people in the world have significantly worse problems than she did - there are people who are blind, missing limbs, homeless, persecuted and imprisoned, uneducated, hungry, at war, etc.  The World we live in isn’t actually a very pretty picture when you think about it - and certainly not a painting.  But still, I got on my soapbox and unabashedly reminded her of how lucky she is to be able to 'only' have work-stress as a ‘problem’ in life just now.  I went on to remind her that I’m 20 years older than she is and that I’ve seen many worse things in life and, if she would just put everything in perspective, work-stress is probably, actually, a ‘good’ thing....I mean, after all, if you have no other concerns to distract you from the stress you feel with work, then you are probably largely safe, secure and healthy - right?

She smiled and nodded and graciously accepted my ‘I’m older than you lecture’ but I realized that I wasn’t making my point very well or very clearly so I thought about how to better frame my argument to her.   I reflected that, in a way, I was actually mildly jealous of how well her life was going at such a young age in comparison to how rocky my younger career and educational life had been.  Then I again thought about perspective...and paintings....and how life is not at all like some beautiful painting.  But it is a painting of sorts - at least in the way that we should look at it.  What I mean is that when you look at a great painting (a Picasso, a Rembrandt, a Chagall, or whatever your particular preference), you don’t stand six inches away from the picture and stare at a tiny section of it....you step far back so that you can take it all in and absorb the way the artist captured his/her ideas on canvas.   The imperfections in the surface and the sharp variations in color blend together at a distance to become something beautiful and engaging.  But  - when we look at our troubles in life, we are looking from 6 inches away because we are so intimate with the daily realities of our own existence; we only see the tiny patch of imperfection in our life’s painting.

I explained the ‘life as a painting’ analogy to her and what I was trying to say seemed to suddenly gel in her mind - and in mine, as well.  While I was talking, I had the revelation that I spend so much time wrapped up in my life that, even though I am a keen watcher of the world around me, I somehow manage to miss looking at my life in perspective....its seems to be a perfect explanation of how and why the grass always seems to be greener on the other side of the fence; because when we look at others’ lives, we can see all of the beauty and harmony that they miss as they are focused on the tiny squares of imperfection that are troubling them.  Hmmmm. 

Well, anyway, it was an epiphany of sorts for me and maybe for my student also - so I just figured I’d share it...not because we haven’t all thought that we should focus less on the negative but maybe because we haven’t considered how and why we do it.  And if we each just take a step back and appreciated the entire painting of our respective lives, then maybe we’d all be just a little bit happier each day.   So, at the risk of sounding all 'Forrest-Gumpy', life is a painting.

There’s gotta be some kind of a story in there...  :-)