Inner Work

For the week of: October 20, 2003

Scaling Up

Life forces us to focus on the immediate, the short-term. Our present moment stays circumscribed with nearly all our attention narrowed to the scale of minutes or hours or days. Even if we fill in our calendars with events planned weeks or months ahead, we take little or no thought or attention for the long-term. On rare occasions we might consider time scales as long as our own lifetime or even the lifetime of our children. But that's as far as it goes in time.

Our spatial neighborhood has a similarly circumscribed extent. We consider our house, our place of work, perhaps our block and the city we live in. Except in extreme cases, we rarely take into our heart our state or nation; only looking at how they affect us.

To enhance our life and our spirit, we can change perspective, enlarge our here and now. If this change is only an intellectual exercise, then it has little effect. But we can work toward enlarging our vision and our concern, both spatially to encompass the Earth and temporally to encompass the vast sweep of the past and future of life on the Earth. This grand scale can open us to an entirely new attitude toward life, toward asking what role we might play as a small, but unique and intelligent, particle in the majestic stream of life's evolution. As a byproduct, our identification with the hurry and worry of life may weaken and allow us to live at ease with our neighbors and ourselves.

For this week, work at scaling up the context in which you live.

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