Whenever I feel really lousy about my life I watch the news. For me it’s like a reset button. It resets my secret power of perspective, and I am always overcome with realization that I have it really good. I believe I inherited this power from my mother. I can hear her voice in my head reminding how much worse it could always be. Reminding me of what many people have to overcome to accomplish something in their lives, and to honor the gifts I’ve been given instead of lamenting all I do not have. If that is not a super power I don’t know what it.

This super power stops me from moping around hour after hour wasting my life away on what I think I should to be doing, or what I ought to have. I most definitely have my moments, but they are short lived. Either I have an ah-ha moment or there is someone in my life to give it to me. I can honestly say it’s not within my power. It’s more like grace. It just comes. But what I do have power over is how much attention I pay to it, and how much I let it affect me.

“I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but doesn’t leave us where it found us.”

– Anne Lamott

I remember having a Medusa-style melt down about who knows what now, I just remember coming undone. Completely. My husband just stood there quietly, watching me. Most likely he was waiting until I took a breath. When I did, he calmly said, ‘really, it’s that bad?’ There was a moment of total silence followed by one of the longest and deepest laughs of my life. NO, it’s not really that bad. Thank goodness for my sage husband. It’s so important to have someone to help you see things as they really are when you can’t, someone to give you a perspective reset. And a gentle one at that.

There is power in not only accepting where we are in life, but in realizing millions of people would love to have what we do. The regular routine of life can grind us down. We begin to take our lives for granted, thinking it will always remain the same. I know all too well how fast everything can change. It’s important to be aware of all the things that go into making our lives so lovely. We have people we love, jobs, houses, food to eat, a healthy body. I think because all these things are rather consistent it is easy to forget what life is like without all the comforts.

When I broke my leg I had to hobble around on crutches for 6 weeks. Everything took ten times longer to do, I couldn’t carry things around, or open doors and walk through them. I was going to school in New York City, you can’t imagine the number of stairs there are to navigate, the crowded streets. All the things I took for granted, the things I could do so quickly were all changed. It was miserable. Of course I had to depend on people to do things for me which I hate, but that is another issue for another day. No matter how bad I felt it was, it still could’ve been worse. And I saw that and it readjusted my attitude. That’s my super power of perspective. Anais Nin says the same,”…the power to transcend the present and to see further than the moment of sorrow.” It about having a grasp on the larger picture of our lives, so that the present moment doesn’t derail us.

I call it a super power because I don’t really have control of it, it just comes. And I am so grateful that it does. Over the years I’ve trained myself to be more aware of it. Whenever I start going down this road of how bad things are in my life I catch myself and think, “Oh yeah, remember it could be way worse,” and I get a shot of this magic called perspective. I’m not the only one in the universe going through a tough time. So I am grateful for my life and everything in it.

We will all have difficult times, and we will all have excruciatingly difficult times, but here’s to navigating them with more tenacity and a realization that it will pass. We all have the choice of how we navigate the tough times.

Wishing you more super powers of perspective.

kb