Changing your field of view

While shopping for a rug this weekend, I was astonished at how different a rug can look when you look at a sample up close versus when you see it full-sized and staged in a living room.?

One rug in particular had a cobble design that triggered my fear of dots (trypophobia) instantly as I approached it, but once I saw it fully laid on the floor with furniture on top of it, something shifted: it actually looked great.?

This phenomenon is a central component of photography, where the photographer asserts what they want the viewer to see, and how they want the viewer to see it, based on the focal length they select. For example in a forest, a long focal length will emphasize a small snippet of it?—?a branch or a tree?—?in extreme detail. But if the goal is to be able to appreciate the forest itself?—?the branch or tree in context?—?a much wider focal length is necessary.?

Perhaps one of the best field-of-view shifting pieces of content in recent history is physicist Carl Sagan’s monologue where he invites listeners to shift from a long focal length to the widest focal length possible?—?reminding listeners that on a pale blue dot (Earth) in space exists everything we’ve ever known:

“Everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there?—?on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Sagan widens listeners’ view with his words in a way that can gently cup and soften some of the sharpest edges of their concerns… almost as if to say “Hey, that problem that has you convinced that it will determine the fate of your world…it’s because you’re zoomed in on it and it’s all you can see. When you take a step back you will realize, and find yourself rest assured, that it’s not that big of a deal. Life goes on (on this pale blue dot).”

Anytime a problem or set of problems that have managed to take up your entire field of view, you can benefit from taking a moment to put them into perspective.?

You can remind yourself of Sagan’s words. Or, you can do something as simple as taking a walk outside which will might help remind you that there is a whole world of things and possibilities beyond wherever you just came from.?

None of this will necessarily solve your problem, but it will certainly put it into context. And sometimes that can make all the difference.?

The Daily Spark exists to:

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About me:

I'm a second-generation Taiwanese American trying to find life’s greatest sources of meaning and make the most out of it.