Practical Exercises - How to balance your perspective

We all know the feeling of being overwhelmed by problems. They seem so enormous that they overshadow everything else in our lives. We dwell on them every hour of the day, they take up all our time and energy and often they immobilise us to the extent that we simply withdraw from the world and become miserable, ineffective, unhappy people. Of course, we can't avoid problems. Pretending that they don't exist is not realistic. But it is always important to try to get a sensibly balanced picture of our own place in the bigger scheme of things and to see our problems in that light too.

Have a look at the graphics below. They should help you to get your mind balanced.



We live on one of the smaller planets in the solar system:


If you look at the larger planets, the Earth starts looking rather small . . .


Bringing the Sun into the picture gives us a further jolt when we see that the Earth is now like a full stop on this page. And that is where we live with all our problems.


Our sun is rather a small star in comparison to others close to us



Antares is the 15th brightest star in the sky and is more than 1,000 light years away. Put youself in the picture if you can.

Now see if you can get your mind around this picture taken by the Hubble telescope in ultra deep field infrared view. It shows countless entire galaxies, each at least the size of our Milky Way wherever you look. They are billions of light years away.


And this is a close-up of one of the darkest areas of the picture above, showing still more galaxies where you only saw black in the picutre above.
Yes, you are still important, and you do have problems, but see them in perspective!