“How beautifully Plato put it. Whenever you want to talk about people, it’s best to take a bird’s-eye view and see everything all at once — of gatherings, armies, farms, weddings and divorces, births and deaths, noisy courtrooms or silent spaces, every foreign people, holidays, memorials, markets — all blended together and arranged in a pairing of opposites.
MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 7.48
When you think about the world and all the masses of people in it, sometimes it’s helpful to get a new perspective and see the bigger picture. People have often climbed mountains or tall trees to get this view, but it’s not a hard requirement — it simply requires a different frame of mind.
Everything seems so incredibly important while you’re down in the thick of it. When you’re running in the rat race, well… that race feels awfully important, doesn’t it? It’s hard to see the big picture — hard to see how we’re all connected.
But the truth is that we are all connected. And we’re all pretty much the same in the end — all of us dust in the wind, lost to time once our time comes. What seems really important to us is nothing in the grand scheme of things. When you get that bird’s-eye view, it all becomes clearer and comes into focus.
How incredibly small we are, when seen from the higher perspective. From the bird’s-eye view, it’s clear that we’re all just part of an endless cycle. The people who come after you will agonize and stress over the same things that you did. Just like your ancestors did, and their ancestors.
Nothing is as serious or grand as it seemed before.
