Choosing Your Perspective

“If we are always arriving and departing, it is also
true that we are eternally anchored. One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.”
~ Henry Miller

I have never been much good at arranging flowers. I’ve never had the eye for it.

That is, until I found myself suddenly vision-impaired as a side-effect of some medication.

Usually my friend Christine arranges flowers from my garden for me when she comes to clean my house. It’s such a simple thing, but her arrangements always give me so much pleasure. Whenever I tried to create an arrangement of my own they never looked as pleasing as Chrissie’s.

While I have been in the city, recovering from surgery, there have been no flowers in our little farmhouse. So now I am home I decided to have another go and do it myself.

It was easier this time. Everything is blurry, so all I had to do was cut some blooms from the garden, choose a vase (an old teapot!) and then begin. I found myself arranging them by placing a few taller flowers and then filling in the holes with colour. It became all about the colour rather than the individual flowers or their shapes. It became about emotion and flow rather than about getting it right, and suddenly I had a vase full of flowers that spoke to my heart.

All I’d needed was to change how I saw things.

It’s amazing what a simple change of perspective can do for you.

I still can’t see very well (I have about 20% vision in one eye and 50% vision in the other) but I am back doing most of the things I always do – with some necessary modifications. I’ve also had some bonuses. As I watched a wedgetail eagle soar above our farm yesterday I realised that the giant bird left a momentary energy trail in the sky, which I could see as a river of colour behind it, mapping its flight path through the sky. It was breathtakingly beautiful.

This doesn’t mean that suddenly I am okay with vision loss. It’s been incredibly hard. At least once a day I teeter at the edge of a dark deep hole. It’s only recently I haven’t fallen in several times a day. Still not a day goes by that I don’t shed a quiet tear or become momentarily swamped by misery. Truth is, I would much rather have my sight.

But crying and feeling bad doesn’t help. It doesn’t solve anything. And after a while it just gets boring. It is what it is, and adapting works better for me than stubbornly resisting what is and being only okay if it all changes back to how it was before.

I do my best to focus on what I can do. I look at how I can adapt and keep moving forward. I search out alternatives and new solutions. I change my paradigm. Looking from a different perspective always helps. It’s one of my best coping skills.

How about you?

Where in your life right now would you benefit from a perspective shift?

Lots of people have been telling me how panicked they are, or how regretful, that this year is almost over and they never got done what they’d hoped to. You can keep looking at life from that perspective, but it essentially means that you give up on your cherished dreams and outcomes. It’s almost over – I’ll stop trying. It’s almost over – there’s no point in even starting.

What if you change that perspective? There are two months left until year’s end. That is time enough to create change and to forge a different result for yourself.

If you’d like to join us for a month of dedicated perspective-shifting and outcome creation, sign up for #GeShiDoMo – our November-long program for creating and completing goals – and finish 2016 strong. I’ve designed this program so that if you are really stuck you can ease back into momentum again. There are choices that allow for all kinds of goal-setting and achievement, and a special category for those of you who actually need to have less DOING and more BEING in order to find a path back to self-care and life balance.

There is always time to change our perspective and try life from a new angle. I know you’ll be glad that you did!

Sending much love to you, Nicole <3 xx