Life is a like a tree with leaves. The angle from which you look at the leaves makes a difference. The way the sunlight falls on the leaves makes a difference. The time of day. The mood you’re in. Trees are multi-dimensioned.
When you climb a tree and look at each leaf with a microscope, you will have microscopic view of leaves. This is what you may often do with your personal life. It is not always to your advantage to view your life as intently as you do. It could make you nearsighted.
Life is to be lived, not examined under a microscope, nor is life to be pushed aside or swept under the carpet or overlooked altogether.
I hesitate to say that life doesn’t need an inspection at all. Insights can arise spontaneously. If I say you will do well to take a long view of life, you may interpret that as just taking a glance, or you may interpret a long view as holding on to the past.
Let the past go and enter the present. You don’t shuffle life along, nor do you race through it. Take the position that life is what it is and that it is also what you make of it. Don’t make too much of life. Well, don’t be in the position of not seeing the forest for the trees.
The life you live can have the appearance of a train with many cars. The life you live can have the appearance of a train chugging uphill, or a train coasting down hill. It can have the appearance of a big beautiful bouquet of roses of all colors. Even as life comes to you as it comes, you can pluck the roses you favor and put them in a vase. You can hug the roses, or you can toss them away. You can see life as a circus of wild animals and be afraid that the wild animals will be get loose and hurt you. Your life is your life, and you can look at it a million ways, and, ultimately, your life is how you look at it.
Just as when there are two women viewing a dress in a store window, one will love it while the other may shake her head absolutely not.
From one point of view, you might say it doesn’t matter one way or the other. On the other hand, it makes all the difference in the world to the dress. One woman buys it and takes it home. It becomes her dress. She wears it and likes herself in what, after all, is only a dress. When the woman who doesn’t buy the dress and doesn’t love it receives it as a gift, then the dress might hang in a closet never to be valued, never taken out and worn or regarded as worth much. The dress itself is the same dress. The dress is innocent.
And so is life about how you look at it and how you nurture it. Whether it’s your life or your dress, how you look at it makes all the difference in the world.
Let your life wear well. Let it be acknowledged and appreciated for what it is. Not your favorite color today? Oh, well, that’s okay. You won’t chasten your life because it appeared this way today and not another way today.
When you bake a pie, sometimes the pie comes out better one day than another. Regardless, you eat it with a glass of milk or a cup of coffee or tea. What the heck! It was a pie you made. You put it to good use.
It’s true that life carries you along wherever it takes you. At the same time, your opinion of your life matters.
Greet each take eagerly. Welcome each day. No matter in what guise your life appears, you will soon say adieu to it and wave goodbye. A day is a passing thing. Life is a passing thing in the world, yet each day is yours to live in and choose the roses.