The Stories We Tell Ourselves

There is nothing new under the sun.

And yet we are endlessly seduced into believing that our particular problem is unprecedented. That our particular version of stuck, or lost, or uncertain, is somehow beyond what has been navigated before. The mind specialises in this — in making the familiar feel catastrophic, in dressing ordinary difficulty in the clothes of the exceptional.

We become the story we are telling about what is happening.

The five senses are the primary source of evidence for most of this. What the eye sees, what the ear hears, what the body feels — these become the authority. They become the foundation on which conclusions are drawn and futures imagined. And those conclusions, once drawn, become very difficult to question.

But any perspective built entirely on sensory evidence is, at best, partial. At worst, it is simply false.

There is a bigger picture than what you can currently see.

Float for a moment above the situation you are in. Not to escape it, but to see it from a different altitude. The globe spinning in space. The long arc of what has already been navigated by those who came before you. The vastness that makes the problem — not insignificant, but smaller. More proportionate.

Walk into a wood. Watch the grass. Let the sparrow exist for a moment without commentary.

Something in you begins to recalibrate.

Start to disbelieve the story.

Not the facts — but the story constructed around the facts. The narrative of impossibility. The conclusions the mind has reached about what this means and where it is going and how it will end.

No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no heart has yet imagined what is prepared for those who are open to it.

The picture is always larger than the frame you are currently standing in.