Last week, I had a good reminder about the importance of maintaining perspective.
It had been a stressful few days at work. At the height of it I found myself in a problematic situation, trying to “fix” an issue that wasn’t my responsibility by sending a quick email. I would have done better to pause, but I was in “go-go-go” mode, driven by anxiety that the situation was causing.
Afterwards, I found myself obsessing about what had happened and how I had reacted. So even though I had initially felt that my email response was the best course of action, by evening I was convinced that it was the worst. This opened the door to allow in unrelated doubts about myself. That frustration carried into my nightly meditation, and ultimately, into fitful dreams.
The next morning, I felt marginally better. But it wasn’t until I checked my text messages that my perspective shifted. I received photos of my father, leg in a cast, at the local hospital’s emergency room. Reason? Cracked tibia bone and deep vein thrombosis.
In an eyeblink, I forgot about what had happened with work. I needed to get more information about my father’s predicament.
As news of exactly what had happened filtered down to me (it was a much more controlled situation than I had initially understood it to be), I went into the office with a different mindset. The work stress that had been top-of-mind and in-my-face was now way over there in the back of the room.
FYI, my father is fine and the trip to the ER was actually a follow up from the previous day’s visit to his doctor where they discovered the fracture and the blood clot. The doc had encouraged the ER trip to get quicker access to an orthopedist. My dad is in good spirits and my mother (a former nurse) has been tasked with administering the clot-dissolving injections.
But the shift in perspective that morning reminded me so much of a similar shift several years ago: prior to my cancer diagnosis I had been experiencing a lot of anxiety at work…but once I learned that the lump in my breast was cancer, everything else fell away. It was as if the roar of work stress suddenly became muffled and all I heard was my beating heart, my health, the important stuff.
I distinctly remember that as I was going through my cancer treatments, in all the concern about what was happening in my body, I experienced the least amount of anxiety about anything going on at work that I’d ever had at that job. It felt like I could handle anything that they threw at me.
Perspective. That’s what I had as I sat in the infusion room. And that’s what I regained last week.
How curious that the shift in perspective was so simple to achieve. All I needed was to remember what was really and truly important and everything changed within a few seconds.
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“Simple” is not necessarily “easy”. We have so many things coming at us in the course of the day and we try to triage them as quickly as we can. It’s expected that we will make “little mistakes” and give more weight to the problem right in front of us–those things that are immediate. But with practice, we can realize that most of those are transient and the important stuff is what deserves our deepest attention and appreciation.
And even the “important stuff” needs to be swept out once in a while.
Frantic Shanti 