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Key points
- The primary purpose of taking in the bigger picture is to help focus one's attention and values.
- People have to learn to catch themselves in the act, noticing when they're mired in details and losing the bigger picture.
- Putting problems in perspective is a master skill, capable of showing people how to navigate challenges.
Shortly after the publication of my book Callings, my publicist got a call from one of the producers at the Oprah Winfrey Show, who wanted to interview me about the possibility of being a guest. I was told to expect a call within the next week.
But the producer didn’t call that week, or the next, or the next, or the next. And what began as a shock of excitement quickly devolved into pacing and muttering and prayer that sounded suspiciously like begging. Every time the phone rang, for a month, I cleared my throat and tried to say hello with charming confidence, even when it turned out to be some guy wanting to sell me storm windows.
Over a month later, the producer finally called, and we spent 45 minutes on the phone, followed the next day by 45 minutes with a different producer, who said she had to get final approval from a senior producer. Which never came.
But over the following weeks, I kept wondering what I could tell myself in that moment while the coin was being tossed. I ran through my options. The philosophical: you call this a problem? The spiritual: relax, it’s out of your hands. The creative: win or lose, it’s all writing material. And the existential: it doesn’t matter—in the big picture, the whole human drama from beginning to end is a skirmish of microbes on the surface of a dish in the sink.
What I was trying to do was more than mere rationalization. I was trying to give myself something I believe is an integral part of living with wisdom and grace, and ameliorating suffering: putting things in perspective. Setting my conundrums and obsessions in the context of a bigger picture that could show me their proper place in the scheme of things, their relative size and importance, and perhaps set my restless soul to rights. And it’s a simple principle of perspective that makes this possible: the farther away I am from something, the smaller it appears.
When you’re in a challenging situation, decision or emotion, according to Stanford neurobiologist Andrew Huberman, your field of vision literally narrows, everything but the object of focus becomes blurry, and your eyes turn slightly in toward your nose. The phrase “He can’t see past the end of his nose” has some basis in science.
But by expanding your visual field—literally zooming out, softening your gaze, widening your peripheral vision—you can unhook yourself from this stress response, from getting mired in details and losing the bigger picture. Up close, you see only the trees. From a distance, you see the forest. Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon.” And the same goes for the psyche.
During a period of uncertainty and stuckness that I experienced some years ago, I had a dream of flying above a frozen lake and seeing fantastic patterns in the ice. I interpreted it to mean that only by rising above ground level and getting an aerial view would I be able to see a larger pattern—the way a painter steps back from a painting in progress.
Granted, sometimes you want to see the trees, and being detail-oriented is a very useful skill. But not always, and not when you’re stuck and frustrated. Then it’s probably more useful to zoom out. Step away from the desk, get a second opinion, take yourself out for a walk, take in the famous “grand scheme of things” as revealed by the natural world—all of which can give you the experience of stepping outside and looking back in through the shop window.
Go on a retreat or vision quest, visit ruins, contemplate the Big Picture by studying history, anthropology, astronomy or paleontology. Stare at a sunset and try to sense the Earth spinning hugely in space. Offer yourself in service to others. Remember how your priorities shifted—your sense of what really matters—during that time you were awaiting a diagnosis, or deep in the throes of a mystical or altered state.
Ironically, the big picture has to be brought up close to have the desired effect on your daily affairs. You have to encounter it personally, intimately, for its payload of perspective to be delivered.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow is famous for his hierarchy-of-needs pyramid—at the bottom of which is food clothing and shelter, and at the top of which, for the longest time, was self-actualization. That is, fulfilling your potential. But right before he died, Maslow had a game-changing insight about that hierarchy, and the bigger picture into which he came to believe it fits. The peak isn’t self-actualization, but self-transcendence. It was his way of acknowledging that even self-actualization is still tinkering with ego and identity, and that there’s something—perhaps spiritual or communal—that transcends even that.
And when you’re up to your elbows in problems and problem-solving while on your way to reaching your potential, a little self-transcendence might be just the ticket. Maybe you find yourself sweating the “small stuff” to the point of exhaustion, or hooked on short-term gains at the expense of long-term values (a couples therapist, commenting on my approach to conflict with my partner, once asked me, “Do you want to be right or do you want to be close?”), or you’re so tangled up in how you’re doing something that you forget why you’re doing it.
The Journal of Positive Psychology reports that people who tend to think about themselves with greater abstraction are happier than people who think of themselves in very concrete terms. For instance, telling yourself that you’re a generally intelligent person correlates with greater life satisfaction than telling yourself you have a 4.0 GPA. (This, however, may not necessarily hold for goal-setting. Telling yourself you want to be healthier isn’t as effective as concretizing that abstraction by actually getting exercise.)
Still, as Albert Einstein once observed, no progress was ever made except by those willing to take their noses off the grindstone of details and take in the bigger picture. But in order to do that, you have to catch yourself in the act. You have to notice when you’ve got your nose to the grindstone of details, or painted yourself into a corner with your own self-talk.
You also have to take a deep breath, because the big picture can be humbling, a confrontation with the error of your ways, or your relative size and significance in the grander scheme of things. Even from orbital distance, for instance, the individual is lost to sight, which can hit you with an existential thud. To say nothing of how you’d fare in a face-off with the stupefying enormity of space, time and evolution, without being stunned into inertia and defeat by it. You might want to sit down first.
But the bigger picture can also inspire you, not just to put some much-needed distance between you and your problems, and shorten the distance between you and your priorities, but remind you that you’re part of something vastly greater than yourself, a history that preceded you by billions of years and will proceed without you for billions more—but that includes you.
And it can inspire you to contemplate one of the great questions posed by gaining any summit, however momentarily: how do you sustain the perspective and wisdom it offers once you head back down the mountain? How do you integrate them into life down on Mulberry Street?
Ironically, the primary benefit of taking in the bigger picture, of widening your field of vision, may be to help you focus. To return you to ground zero—where you are, who you are—with renewed clarity, purpose, and appreciation.
It may be fair to say, too, that just the process of getting older educates us in the matter of perspective. You’re sadder, perhaps, but wiser, and this wisdom can bring you back into right relationship with yourself and the world. Maybe you have to surrender the infiniteness of your aspirations and certainties, and maybe it’s a surrender that feels like defeat, but it’s also a kind of liberation. You know better where you stand with life.
And the bigger the picture you’re able to see of life—the larger the frame of reference you’re able to put around it—the more likely you are to understand why putting things in perspective is a master skill, capable of showing you what really matters and what doesn’t, what’s within your control and what isn’t, and how to navigate the challenges in your life.
When middleweight boxing champion Marvin Hagler lost his title to Sugar Ray Leonard in Las Vegas in 1986, through a still-debated referee’s decision, he moved to Rome to begin a career in Italian action movies, after a stint as an alcoholic.
“I was angry as hell when they took away my title,” he said. “But when you stand in the Pincio Gardens at sunset looking down on the whole of Rome, across centuries, it sort of puts things in perspective.” As Christopher Woodward remarks in his book, In Ruins, Hagler was merely the last of many proud kings who went to Rome and were consoled by the sight of a far greater fall.
