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“The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us. If youcan do that, and live that way, you are really a wise man.” – Euripides
Two of the weblogs I follow had interesting posts recently. The fist post by Seth Godin was titled Do You Have 16 Boxes?. In this post Seth elegantly describes a method of keeping perspective by (and I paraphrase here) imagining 16 boxes with each box representing a part of your life. As one box is doing very well, others may be doing poorly. By looking at the bigger picture, meaning all 16 boxes, it is much easier to stay in balance. This is an interesting way of looking at virtually any situation.
In another post, The Value of Normalizing the Situation by Frank Roche, he described how the US Airways flight landing on the Hudson River was handled by government officials on television. They normalized the situation by documenting the facts and moving on without sensationalizing them. This was in no way a minimizing of the heroic effort of now famous “Sully,” but a refreshing lack of sensationalism.
These two posts remind me of how we live in an Attention Deficit Disorder society and as a whole we demand instant gratification. Whatever jumps to the forefront of our attention demands all of our attention – at the expense of everything else. We also tend to magnify everything at the forefront, more often than not to a greater extent than it deserves. These are powerful forces society has embedded in each of us and difficult to pull away from.
Reading these posts was also encouraging in that they both refreshingly showed how an extremely heroic action can be presented in a big picture perspective, and how each of us can keep everything we are doing in perspective. I have to believe that maintaining a level head in both the good and bad times leads to better balance and a lowered stress level. In challenging economic times we are entering, these are things to remember.
Hi Russ,
Great points about keeping perspective. It is so funny how fractured the world can be around us…and it sometimes seems like everything is of equal importance. As you point out, it’s not.
Thanks for the mention on Directionally Correct. Very cool name for a cool concept. I look forward to reading more of your work. You’re in my Google Reader now.
Thanks Frank. One of the points on keeping perspective is that there are always may aspects to consider. They will not all be of equal weight, but at no time should myopia set in where one exceptionally good (or bad) aspect be looked at to the exclusion of all others.