Zoom Out

You cannot appreciate a painting if you are too close…
or perhaps in it

As you move closer and closer to an object…things start to blur…
one loses perspective

I have been moving quite a lot in the recent past. With each new place I have gone to, I have grown accustomed to it fairly quickly. I am amazed at the ability of the mind and the body to adapt. Given a few days or perhaps a week or two – the place does not seem ‘new’ any more. The biting winter does not seem all that bad. We just get used to things. Good in a way. In this day and age, work and life can take people to strange places. But this ability to adapt quickly – sometimes steals away the beauty of a new experience. Before you can even savor a place or situation – you start to see things with a different lens…one that is dusty or jaded!

For instance, when someone asks me – and I tell them I am in (or rather was) in London, I hear people go WOW. While I was there, it took a day or two for the ‘wow feeling’ to become a ‘so what reaction’. Though in the next breath if I’d asked them where they were, and I heard someone say Sydney or Chicago and my heart would go ‘wow’ again.

If I tell you to close your eyes and imagine what comes to your mind’s eye when I say the word ‘London’ – I guess you’d see the Tower Bridge or Big Ben or Shinny Big Red Bus or Telephone Booth…I would imagine people would get a flash of images or a panoramic view of places that are quintessentially London. When I am sitting in a house in London, I see in front of me the wall of my house or perhaps the street out of the window, if am outside I may find myself concentrating on the cold weather more than where I am. London does not seem breath taking any more. My panoramic view shrinks and becomes a picture of my immediate surroundings.

Our capacity to retain the newness of an experience is (or perhaps has become thanks to over exposure) very short.

I do not like this ‘getting used to’ feeling. It is dangerous to get used to things, especially so given the profession I am in. People involved in research, are after all supposed throw light on common everyday occurrences.

I sometimes wish I could just wipe off the dust on the lens though which I see things – so that the picture in front of me appears clearer…fresher and brighter.

I mulled over this thought for a while…about what I could do to keep my vision clear,about how not to lose perspective. I found at least one way of doing this and that was to… ‘zzzzzoom out’…Well the feeling of zooming out is better felt than expressed in words I suppose…but I’ll try to show you here what I mean

The first picture…does not mean anything expect black and white patches.
From thesecond picture one can at least identify ‘a roof’ and guess that it is covered with snow.

From the third picture one can see the landscape. Snow on a rooftop becomes beautiful when seen from a distance.

Now a days I try to zoom out while I am walking tothe supermarket or simply feeling the humdrum of a day…and more often than not…I end up with a :)

Categories: Reflections_