Perspective is a really important thing to be playing with as you’re navigating a challenging time. I remember, I was in a country on a speaking tour, and it was quite a poor country. I was walking to the restaurant to have a dinner. As I walked there, I had to walk through this place where there was these shacks. I still remember, it was a star-filled sky. I saw this young girl, I’m guessing she was about 12 years old. She was sitting alone, and she was eating a piece of bread, and she had the largest smile on her face and her eyes were sparkling. So amidst all of that difficulty, she found perspective and she linked to her blessings. Makes me think of the lotus. The lotus is a flower that grows in swamps, and yet it’s one of the most beautiful flowers in the world. To navigate hard times is to really gather perspective, to really ask yourself… to go up to your mountaintop and then look, look across and really get a sense of the truth of what’s going on. Your gratitude, what you’re grateful for, how could this be worse? Perspective also involves remembering the shortness of life. We live on a tiny planet, in a large galaxy with trillions of other planets. Are our problems really that big? That’s perspective.
