 In everyday life, it's completely normal and understandable to be very focused on the details. Like the old cliche, one step at a time, you're paying attention to that one step. You're looking at what is, or to use another cliche, what's on your plate. Deal with what's on your plate. Eat what's on your plate. There's one thing in front of you. You're focusing on that. Zoomed in on a particular detail of this moment, this task, this piece of life. So that's really the default operating mode, but it can be useful to sometimes zoom out. Sometimes when I'm too focused in on the one thing in front of me, it's like it's easy to forget that there's anything else in life. There's anything else in the world. This like life becomes this one detail that we're working on. So if it's a very unrewarding, unsatisfying and really dismal activity that we're focusing on, it's possible to feel like life itself is just that. That there's nothing else to look forward to. That this little thing, this little hole is our whole life. Zooming out, instead of just looking at what's going on today, look what's going on this week, even this year. What's my vision for this year? What's my life this year? And if even that can be too detailed, sometimes it's possible to zoom out to our whole life. What is the full picture of my life and sort of zoom out on time so that I'm seeing my whole life? So what does life look like in this zoomed out picture? Well, it's certainly a lot simplified because you can't see all the details, the every day, every minute kind of details that usually fill our attention. Instead we have the big picture and the big picture of life is a very open. It can be a very open vision where you don't have a defined set of activities that you must do precisely. You have a lot of flexibility and freedom. Even if you have major commitments that you have decided, well you are deciding in the context of your whole life, you are deciding to take on those commitments. That's your choice. The ultimate level of life, there's nothing you need to do except live and die. That's all you need to do. And you could argue that you don't even need to live. You could have a very marginal existence that you don't really need to. I guess you would need to live in some minimal sense. But there's really nothing that you really have to do except eventually die. So when you zoom it out to that perspective, well you can see how you can't operate in that perspective all the time because it is so vague and you can't see any details. And if you want to get anything done, you have to zoom in and get those details done. But I like to be able to zoom out like that so that I can get out of the details that I'm in in the moment. Get out of that feeling that I'm stuck on this one point and my whole life is this one place. And remember that life is a much bigger thing than whatever I am in at this moment. There is so much more out there. And even in my entire life, I can barely taste a tiny bit of it. When I look at my life in this wide perspective, it just makes me feel grateful that I have a chance to have this experience. I don't know why I'm here. I don't know why we are existing. I don't know what it all means. But I love the fact that I get a chance to have an existence. A chance to have some of this experience. That base feeling of gratitude and wonder at the chance to live a life in this universe is something that is always available. It's always there as long as we have life. As long as we have this consciousness, we can look at that. Look at the fact that we have it and say, wow, this is great. But when your day to day, when your hours are filled from waking to sleeping with activity after activity, that is dreary and provides no satisfaction, it's very easy to forget. It's very easy to forget that basic principle. And it's easy to feel like our life is a whole bunch of painful, painful and unrewarding things. But if we zoom out, we can see that each of those painful and unrewarding things is part of a bigger thing that we are choosing. We are choosing to do dull tasks because they support something bigger that we do appreciate. Ultimately zooming out to the biggest picture, our whole lives. So this is something I like to do whenever I feel stuck on a tiny piece of life. Always remember whatever pointer at now is just one tiny piece of what's there in the bigger picture.