“Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.” Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
I’d even take that a quote step further and suggest that we can even look at the same thing we’ve looked at before and choose to see it in a new or different way.
The world doesn’t present different situations to different people, it’s not even presenting us with different situations day to day. The world is the world and what changes, is how we decide to view the world. When we look at life or a particular situation, we get to choose which lens we put on and therefore, how we view it. The lens we look through is definitely made up of our experiences, beliefs and our values, but at the heart of each lens is basically a reflection of the way we are feeling inside at any given moment.
We do this in all areas of our lives. We look at our partner and say, “I love you” on the day when we are wearing our love or happiness lens. The next day we can look at them and say, “I can’t stand that about you.” Our partner didn’t change from one day to the next, the way we looked at them changed. And, the powerful knowledge is knowing that if something isn’t working, we can change the lens we look through and change the way we view things.
The lens we wear colours everything in our life, so when we aren’t aware about something upsetting from work, we often keep that same lens on and it affects our drive home, interactions with strangers and our relationships. And, in the same way, we can be feeling joyful or excited about something and through that lens of happiness, nothing seems to bother us or affect us because we are just feeling so good inside and everything seems to magically go our way.
We often think it is the world that needs to change. I don’t think the world does need to change…it is our lens or the way we decide to view the world that needs to change. And, the irony is that once we start changing the way we look at the world, the world really does start to change too.
What lens are you looking through today?
