Painting the Big Picture

As we create our lives, one of our most important tasks is to paint pictures. As the artist, we determine whether the view we hold is a bull’s eye, clear cut, precise interpretation of the moment we are experiencing or whether it is sweeping, global, pandemic, universal.

To put it more simply, are we looking at the minute details or the big picture?

And, while there are substance and validity to both views, one may perhaps be a better collaborator in fulfilling our Divine contract to traverse the human landscape we inhabit.

When we react to something or someone that distresses us, it is so very natural to shift into the magnitude of the feelings that arise…our pulse may quicken, our muscles become tight, our mouths dry as we become the emotion we are experiencing. And, from this vantage point, it is very difficult and challenging to see or even sense the broad view of what is happening.

But, when we engage our artist’s brush to paint the big picture, everything rearranges itself, presenting us with a wider, more sweeping view of what has just occurred.

We see not just the person’s words or behavior of the moment, we discern the totality of the mysterious, complicated creature in front of us, including his hopes and dreams (realized or unfulfilled), attempts to negotiate life (successful or not), and, perhaps most importantly, aspirations for what he truly would like to be. And we are then privileged to see not just what is being expressed in that moment…which may come from hurt or a sense of rejection or failure... but the beauty of the whole person who is, alongside us, traveling through the challenges of our earthly home.

And this bigger picture can also help us view the distressing circumstances of our lives with the knowingness that we are receiving guidance and protection of our spirit. (Can you paint the picture of your spiritual guides watching over you with love and compassion?)

And if you can view this bigger picture as a steppingstone to the magnificent understanding that is to come about how the circumstances of our lives have taken us so beautifully, so perfectly to the place we have wanted to be…then, the bigger picture becomes one of our greatest guides in moving through the experiment we call life in this dimension.

The good news:

We have the power to change our artist default button to this position…to lift the intensity of the suffering we sometimes endure and help us gain a new mastery of our personal and global universe.