Seeing yourself from the inside-out can be challenging.

Sometimes, seeing who you are in a multitude of perspectives can give you a much more comprehensive view of yourself as a whole, and give you much-needed insight as to what you’re made of, down a deep, where it really counts.

When I started my weight loss journey it felt like I was standing at the base of a monolithic mountain and looking up to the summit and thinking “That is impossible. I cannot climb that.”

But sometimes you’re not aware of what you’re capable of until you have to be.

Until you step up to that plate and take your swing, you may not even  know if you can hit the ball.

It’s easy to get tunnel vision, and to corner yourself into a narrow way of thinking that does not allow you to see outside of the parameters that  you have established. What’s not easy, however, is to harness the ability look at yourself differently than you have become accustomed.

Viewing the world in a different way can open you up to ideas and practices that you may have never entertained otherwise.

As a parent, I have had been privy to a multitude of refreshing moments and perspective changing conversations with both of my boys, and sometimes you can forget that the world can be viewed in many many different ways.

But every once in a while, as a grown-up, you have a particular moment where you get a glimpse into the mind of someone that redirects your own thinking. And on this particular occasion it was through the “fresh eyes” of my seven year-old son.

While driving by a local bookstore, we had stopped at a red light, and my son, who had just learned to read, was peering out the window.

There was a large banner in front the bookstore that read, ‘Giant Book Sale!’

My son, after reading it aloud, then turned to me with a perplexed expression and asked, “Mom, why are only the giant books on sale?”

It caught me a little off guard, but then I realized that to him, it was a valid question.

And after trying to explain to him that it was the word “giant” was referring to the size of the sale and not the size of the books, I stopped myself, and just tried to look at the sign from his perspective.

I suppose it would have been less confusing if the sign has simply stated “giant sale on books”. But because most things in this world are left to our own interpretations, and the English language in itself is fairly complex, we are left with our own deciphering of the world around us to help us make sense of our surroundings.

So rather then correcting him, I gave him an answer.

I told him that perhaps they had too many giant books, and had run out of room, so maybe they needed to sell more of them to make space for the smaller ones. He seemed satisfied with that answer, and that was that.

That particular encounter had prompted me to begin thinking about the value of true perspective.  Continue reading The View From Here →