Sometimes a change is as good as a rest. I had a chance to take a break from regular life and I took it…and it was good.
While I was in Calgary this weekend, I gloried in the chance to do some extra runs, breathe deeply and spend some time to myself (in the mornings)…and in the afternoons and evenings I would spend time at a gigantic volleyball tournament in the Olympic Speedskating Oval at the University of Calgary.
A change pushes a person to see things differently…and things that I’ve known suddenly come alive in new ways. I hope to share a bunch of these with you over the next days.
Lesson #1 that was reinforced to me was about “Perspective”. We have choices in this life about which direction we choose to look in. That can make a big difference.
My morning running route was downtown. This is a typical view of downtown and what I saw:
Skyscrapers, cranes, construction, and one building after another. Big city, big time…noise, clutter, overwhelming busy-ness. I am a “city girl” and so it is fun to be amongst the hustle and bustle, but there is stress inherent in the downtown that a person can just feel.
If I stood in the exact same spot, but turned 180 degrees, this is what I saw:
Greenery, a beautiful river, trees, ducks and other wildlife…it was truly peaceful. No kidding…all I did was turn around in the exact same spot to snap the second photo.
It was a startling reminder to me that I have choices in a situation, and I can choose to look in one direction at a situation or look in the opposite direction and see something very different.
- I can focus on the friend who’s betrayed me, or the many many friends who have not.
- I can focus and be completely discouraged on a particular business challenge, or I can deal with that challenge in light of all the other things that are happening, many of which are positive.
- It’s tempting to focus on a part of me that is frustrated or sad, and ignore the parts of me that have hope and optimism–if I don’t look at the parts of me that enjoy life, it’s easy to forget that they are there.
I’m not talking about being naive, and pretending that struggles/challenges/disappointments don’t exist…but we can deal with them like that is the whole picture, or understand that there is a larger context. That context, if taken in, changes how we deal with the rest of it.
I could choose to feel like I was in the middle of a busy city, or that I was in a green oasis…and that was shaped by where I chose to focus. By turning my head, I could change my experience of the run. This weekend, I was into “soul care”…I didn’t have business in this city, and I chose to focus almost exclusively on the babbling water, the furry ducklings, and the green of the grass and trees.
The way I turned my head this weekend refreshed me.
Today, I choose to be aware that the city is on my left, but I focus on the park like beauty on my right.
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