The Art of Perspective

Everybody’s got baggage. Everyone. And everybody deals with it in their own way. In the love and relationships department (both romantic and family) I’ve been through some drama the past couple of years. I’ll spare you all the details, although you can find quite a bit on it in previous blogposts. Now two things can happen after something like that: you become cynical, bitter, and/or closed off to people, or you can put pain in perspective.

Let me start off with a little disclaimer: I have gotten a little bit cynical about the whole love thing. I don’t believe in unconditional, I don’t believe in “the one” and I’m not a romantic person. Some people would call me pessimistic. I prefer calling it a realistic, but you know, whatevs.

Let’s start with some basics. What would the opposite of pain be? Emotional pain, you pervs. OK so, that’d be joy, right? Cool. So let’s put joy on a scale. So suppose ‘Joy’ can be put on a scale from 1 to 10, and you’re in a situation where you’re generally a 7 (be it work, a romantic relationship, whatever it is). That’s decent, right? You’re reasonably happy, therefore if something bad happens, you’ll probably be reasonably hurt. If pain is a scale from 1 to 10 too, I’d put that at about a 7 as well. It depends on what happens of course, but it’ll never be worse than a 7. Because it simply doesn’t give you enough joy to hurt more than a 7. Follow me so far?

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I wanted to put a cool visual here but unfortunately I’m Photoshop-challenged.

Cool. So this is why some people call me cynical, since people tend to use this as an excuse to not care too much or not give their all in a situation. But that’s not what I mean by it. You have to put things in perspective. Pain is relative. Not in how one painful experience can be compared to another, but to joy. What that means is: the only way you’ll truly madly deeply experience joy, is if you are willing to run the risk of that extreme pain. 9 times outta 10 it’s worth it anyway. If not for knowing what joy you’re capable of experiencing, it’ll be a lesson. For me the lesson was: if I can be hurt this deeply, it means I was capable of being at least as intensely happy as this sucks right now. Which is a good thing. Think about it. Then tell me what you think.