Big picture

Lately, I’ve been getting a bit more overwhelmed than usual.

What I mean by this is that, in the midst of all the work and hassle and hustle and bustle of normal life, I’ve not had any time for me, to relax, to reflect, to reminisce, to contemplate life generally.

And having that time is important.

This is a great video which gets at a point I think is really crucial to understand.

In a world obsessed with productivity, taking time out to relax and reflect, to look inside of you and assess how you are doing in life on a grander scale, to step back and take a once-in-a-while look at the big picture of your life is frowned upon.

That’s wasted time. Time that could be spend studying. Or working. Or eating. Or sleeping. Or doing.

But taking that sort of time out of our daily hectic lives, not only to appreciate what we have but also just to judge where we are in our lives, whether we are happy and content with the path that we have chosen to take, what we think we could be doing differently: all of these questions are lurking under the surface of the normal everyday but they are the fundamental building blocks of why we live. If we don’t have satisfactory answers to these, the very idea of living comes into question.

People get obsessed with getting things done that they forget to look after themselves. And I’m as guilty as most people on this issue.

But keeping your mental health in as good a shape as you can is so vitally important. Yes, it does and can boost your productivity in working as you’ll be more efficient if you’re working with a clearer mind. But that shouldn’t be the primary motivation for wanting to calm down a bit.

That primary motivation should be for you, to help you live a better, more thoughtful and ultimately more fulfilling life.

If we just go by from day to day living by our whims and desires, being tossed around by the emotional winds of the moment, lacking overall purpose and a sense of direction, that can often lead to feelings of overwhelm, of dread, of anxiety, of purposelessness, of fear, of sadness, of loss of hope.

It’s like trying to drive a car on empty.

We need fuel in our engines. And that fuel is provided via an overall objective, a purpose, a mission to our lives. And yes, we can tinker along most of the time without giving these important questions much thought and, in the end, it all settles down just fine.

But in those moments, those scary moments where we forget just why we are doing what we are doing, we get so involved in a piece of work or with something or someone that we forget the bigger picture: then life can suddenly become too much to handle.

The bigger picture is important. Consider it more often.

Till next time 🙂