Consider Your Perspective, Again

Sometimes it’s a new event that puts you at odds with your world. What gives? How did this happen? Do I blow a gasket? Or do I shrug my shoulders and move on?

Part of the answer comes from your personality. The other parts are made up of the moment and how you deal with something new or different.

Experiences of life can help you handle these moments. You line them up to something you’ve dealt with in the past, and voila! There’s a template to help frame your response.

Recently, I watched someone react to something they were not happy about. You could see their demeanor shift as they determined how to accept the moment, handle it, and move on. It was nearly an hour spent watching the transformation. You could see it in the making, hit its full stride, and then handle the resulting process of their choice.

That’s my perspective of the moment. Now, apply your perspective to their experience. What would you do? What would be your result?

We are each unique and come to the table of life with toolboxes and baggage.

Take this thought and move through life long enough, and you’d probably work hard at changing your perspective on the everyday challenges we all face.

Here’s An Exercise

Make four columns on a piece of paper.

• Jot down the things you don’t like in the first column.
• Next to the item, what is your typical response? How does the subject/item make you feel?
• In the third column, note what you can do to change your response.
• In the last column, write your ideas of what you need to improve your response.

My list contains things like Watermellon, Sushi, and Dill/Sour pickles. But the list is not limited to a food group. You can add practices and personalities to the list. You can even add brand names! Mac, Pepsi, Toyota.

This is not a foolproof exercise. You may find it freeing. Or not. For me, it’s a good exercise to consider what’s in my baggage and which tools I have to address the issue when I need to deal with it.

For me, I am freed to move on. I know the what’s and reactions. My baggage is known, and my tools are handy. Now, let it go and move on.

This Morning

I’m not much to listen to the chatter in the early morning hours. No music, radio, or “reels,” as the noisemakers are nominally called in the Social world. I’m a quiet person in the mornings. You can hear the gears of my mind waking up and handling my morning read. Then, you hear the clatter of a keyboard as I write my morning thoughts.

I’m a soundless morning person.

Still, every so often, someone I follow makes their way into my morning light, and I enjoy the guilty pleasure of listening to them. For just a minute, please, turn the sound up. Are they making sense? Put it into my toolbox. Now, go silent again.

This happened this morning. A relatively new author to me, Jon Acuff, did a short 51-second video that filled my toolbox with the proper tools to face a challenge this week. Here’s a link to his Twitter posting if it stays up. I’m not going to give you the tools, but I will point you where to find them.

Here’s a question for you to consider: What’s God’s perspective? Hmmm. Figure that out, and the trials of today can be handled.