Zoom In! Zoom Out!

Honest answer here.

How many times have you picked up something and gotten so wrapped up in it that you forgot everything else and kept at it so long that you almost completely ignored everything else around you?

It is an amazing feeling. And its almost always worth getting to that place.

But as is everything, too much of anything is never great. There are two sides to the coin.

Most of us fall into this myopic vision category at some part of time or the other. The funny thing is that there are so few of us far-sighted enough that if you think of the antonym of myopic, most of us would actually draw a complete blank.

There have been many times that I have gotten caught up making that perfect sketch, down to every detail on it, that I fell out of time towards the entire job at hand.

How many times (and this is for those rather intellectual bunch out there) has this happened in a math exam, where you decided you simply had to solve that one question that you could not crack. So much so that you ignored the rest of the questions because they weren’t challenging enough, and in the process you ran out of time.

Or how many times have you spent time to make that presentation template perfect only to realize that you spent way too much time to make that and now have too little time left to fill in the actual content of that presentation.

These are just a few examples of a micro level of ‘zoom-in’. Each of us have our own instances to relate to. The end result, too little time spent looking at the bigger picture, losing out valuable time and energy that could have been spent on the more important landscapes of life.

Getting caught up in the following of a sport that takes over your life, or spending all the time with your girlfriend or boyfriend, or more seriously even putting off that entrepreneurship opportunity for that steady income job - basically one aspect of your life completely taking over its entirety. That’s a macro level of ‘zoom-in’.

Either way, be it zooming in through the course of one day, or zooming in through the course of one year, both can be just as harmful.
Think about it.

Often on looking back on many micro and macro levels of zooming in, would you have realized that quite a bit of it was actually great, but it cost you more dearly in terms of time and emotion in life as compared to that tiny amount of satisfaction that you thought was the world to you when you did.

So no matter who you are, even if you are an artist of sorts, zoom-out!
Every few minutes or weeks, take a step back. Look at your life in tune from a third person point of view. Look at yourself as would a stranger peering into your life. Gauge this stranger’s reaction. Understand the advice this stranger would impart to you.
Take that advice! Take it seriously!

This, today, is your life.

Zoom out, and then zoom right back in. Understand that you must find a balance in your life with what you value and what would help your path, rather than an instant gratification that gives you some momentary pleasure. Go for that extended orgasm of the entirety that is your life. Look at the macro levels of your life, not constricted by any limits, be it time, passion or money.

Stay zoomed out long enough to grasp the direction and actions towards your life. Stay zoomed in long enough to make sure you are relatively satisfied with the depth of each of your actions to give you peace of mind. But get out of the zoom-out mode before you waste away your life in mere though and lack of action, and also step out of the zoom-in mode before you are consumed by that one action of self gratification that might be meaningless in the long run.

Devil is in the detail- And so is God. Zoom-in long enough to find them both, but zoom-out before either of them consumes you.

Alternate.

Zoom-in.

Zoom-out.

And then zoom-in again.

Oh! And the antonym of myopic is hyperopic.