“Whether we love, or close our hearts to love, is a mental choice we make, every moment of every day.”—Marianne Williamson
“Observations not only disturb what is to be measured, they produce it.”
Pascual Jordan, German physicist
This is a story about a speck and infinity. Since infinity is a rather difficult concept to grasp, I’m going to use the metaphor of this familiar painting:
For the sake of argument, let’s pretend Mona Lisa here is infinity.
And here is Exhibit A. Ergo: a speck:
( . )
It should be pretty obvious, even to the untrained eye, that Da Vinci’s famous painting is a heck of a lot bigger than this itty, bitty speck.
.
Notice, you practically have to strain your eyes to see it.
Yet the speck is what we have spent the last several months (and indeed most of our lives) focusing upon. The speck is the anomaly of say, this year’s political season.
While most of the world is perfectly fine (the sun’s still rising, autumn’s trees are still ablaze in brilliant colors, school crossing guards are still directing hand-holding kindergartners across the street) and 99.999999 percent of its inhabitants are safe and alive and still breathing fresh, clean air, we’ve glued our attention to this one insignificant speck.
The world we see on television–the mayhem, the violence, the unsightly bathtub scum–is but a particle, a grain, a hardly-worth-registering speck. Especially when you compare it to the size and scope of the Creator’s enterprise here. Our earth is one planet among billions of planets that form one single universe of which we’re told there are also billions.
We draw out of the magnificent Field of Infinite Potentiality a speck of seeming disaster and we staring at it like it’s a 16-plex movie cinema.
Herein, lies the challenge of our times. We animate into our lives whatever we place our attention upon.
Once something grabs our attention (a headache, a bad review, an unfortunate world event), we devote every waking moment to worrying about it, to getting the latest twitter updates. And as long as we keep looking at the speck, it will only grow.
What do you say we bring our attention back to what’s working, to beauty, to Truth.
If you can see even a tiny glimpse of goodness, of peace, of kind, well-meaning fellow humans, place your attention on that. This simple truth is what will ultimately save the world.
We draw into our lives whatever we focus upon. Isn’t it time to take our battery-powered headlamps off the speck and focus on the beauty, the depth and the Truth of Mona Lisa?
Pam Grout is the author of 18 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality and the just released, Thank and Grow Rich: a 30-day Experiment in Shameless Gratitude and Unabashed Joy.
