• What situation are you in that feels stuck and unchangeable?
• What is the re-circulating narrative in your mind about this situation?
• What happens to your energy level, mood, and sense of possibility when you inhabit this narrative?
• What experiment might access a different perspective?

Flying over the American West, I generally indulge my introversion by sitting in window seats and not talking to my neighbor. The views out the windows, however, are inevitably spectacular.

As I write this, a photographer and a former geologist, I am watching the windswept snowy ridges of Northern Utah slide by, with their intricately carved forms and occasionally reddish sedimentary strata adding a tinge of color to a brilliant white landscape. The world seems spacious, beautiful, and generally marvelous.

At 35,000 feet, it’s hard to remember last night’s difficult night with Walker. The complex and interconnected decisions we’re facing about lifestyle, medical treatments, and the future are still there, but I don’t feel lost in them in the same way I sometimes can.

It’s not that flying over Utah is hiding; in fact, I can see our situation rather more clearly from a distance. Here, it feels less overwhelming, and there appear more possible courses of action.

It is an unforgiving fact that we can rarely see our situations clearly when we’re in them. Making our subjective experience into something we can witness as object is the central move of human development.

Often, we’re so tangled in our own narrative about what’s not possible to discover that some of those limitations are, in fact, quite illusory. Getting perspective is critical in order to see where we are and what possibilities we might be missing.

To get a larger and more generative perspective, we can engage in any number of strategies. Doing these consistently helps strengthen the alternative perspective.

• Engage in a rigorous inner practice of some sort. Meditation, self-observation, centering, perspective-shifting are some. There are countless more. (See Subscribe for more)
• Specifically generate a set (say, five) of distinct alternative perspectives on your situation. See which are more liberating and generative, and which feel oppressive or limiting. Find more evidence to support the liberating ones.
• Go on trips. Travel. Get out of your world, and see it from the outside.
• Make a request of someone with knowledge of perspective-shifting or witnessing approaches.
• Watch a movie or read a book that speaks to our situation in a different way, or offers a useful metaphor or role model.
• Get exercise! Physical exercise breaks up our incessant thought patterns, stimulates creativity, restores perspective, and increases vigor.