The Bird’s Eye View and the Worm’s Eye View
We are living in crazy times. We are so polarized we can barely talk to anyone who sees things differently than we do. Friendships and even family members have become so angry with each other they no longer speak.
I relate to all this. I have been caught up in this insanity as much as anyone.
A Broader Perspective Can Help
One thing I have found to help get me out of this insanity is to start taking broader perspectives on our troubled times.
In other words, I try not to get so caught up in the day to day craziness and instead, view things from a larger context.
Doing this helps pull me out of the immediate day to day mayhem and allows me to see it from a calmer perspective.
It gives me a framework to understand what is going on. It helps.
This doesn’t mean these immediate problems don’t affect me, they do, but it keeps me from getting completely caught up in them and losing myself.
As with everything, we need balance
Obviously we can’t just float above the day to day turmoil, not allowing its negativity to touch us, or as Barbara Bush once said, “To soil my precious soul.”
But we also don’t want to be so consumed by it that we become overly stressed.
We need the perspective of a broader vision to put the day to day events in context.
Others have termed these two ways of viewing reality, “the worm’s eye view” and “the bird’s eye view”
The Worm’s Eye View
The worm’s eye view is just what it implies. We live down in the “dirt” of our everyday existence, dealing with life’s practical demands. Our nose is to the grindstone as we slowly inch our way forward.
Every little hill we have to climb over, can at times, seem like the proverbial mountain. If we are stressed, those little hills can really set us off.
Don’t get me wrong, we need the worm’s eye view. Nothing much would get done without it.
If we have a project at work, a manuscript, or a school paper to complete, or anything that requires an intense focus on details, we need to be able hike over the obstacles and get it done.
However, if we live our lives from the worm’s eye view all the time, we will burn out.
Looking around the world with all the division, stress, and anxiety, it would appear that much of the world does exactly that.
The Bird’s Eye View
This is where the bird’s eye view comes to the rescue. It is the view that lets us soar above the everydayness of our lives and see the bigger picture.
It allows us to put that final work project, manuscript or paper into proper perspective.
If those projects are so important to us, then this view will reinforce that and give us the drive and energy to complete them.
If they aren’t that important and we feel they are just a waste of our time, then maybe we decide we don’t want to do them. If we have to finish them for whatever reason, then after we’re done we might think about moving our lives in a different direction.
One can see these two views play out in Michelangelo’s painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
There were times when he is right up close to the painting, focusing on a small detail, adding his touches to it. That’s the necessary work of the worm’s eye view. Wouldn’t have the paintings without it.
But then he needs to step back and see how that small detail fits into the whole picture.
Up close he might have thought what he had done there was perfect, but on stepping back and taking the broader view, he might change his mind and decide it wasn’t so perfect after all.
That’s what the bird’s eye view can do for you.
We can be so caught up in various activities or causes that up close they appear wonderful. But when we step back, we realize it is not what we really want for our life. We can actually do better and by that I mean choose a more fulfilling and meaningful path for ourselves.
My Own Example
An example of this in my own life was when I got a job at Arco Solar. Yes, back then, in the 80s, Arco actually had a solar plant in Camarillo California. I worked there for about 3 years growing solar crystals that would then be cut into wafers attached to solar panels.
At the time, most of the solar panels were going to businesses in the desert that didn’t want to pay to have electric lines put up.
I worked in this small area with four other people, each one of us running three machines. It wasn’t a bad job. Growing the crystals took some skill so it wasn’t completely mind-numbing, and I got along well with my co-workers which made it more enjoyable because once you got your crystals growing, there was a lot of down time as they grew. You did have to monitor them to make sure nothing went wrong and things could go very wrong.
I worked the graveyard shift from 6pm to 6am replacing the crew that had just replaced us 12 hours earlier. We worked four day shifts and then had four days off as another crew came on to work during our four days off.
As I said, it wasn’t bad. But when my vacation came around and I had my two weeks off, I would go somewhere. During the second week of my vacation, I started to feel that this wasn’t the job for me. Something was missing. It was subtly numbing in a way. I would feel that whenever I got away from it for a couple of weeks.
But after my vacation, when I went back to work, it only took a couple days to a week for me to fall back into the routine and think this isn’t so bad, and any thought of quitting vanished.
Then the same thing happened when my next vacation came around, only I felt it more intensely this time. But once again when I went back to work, I fell back into the routine.
Finally, as I started my third vacation, I realized that if I was ever going to quit, I had to do it before I returned to work. So I resolved myself to go in, contact my boss and give him my two-week notice, which I did.
He tried to talk me out of it. Told me they thought I could move up in the company. He said it was a good job with good people. All that was true, but I knew I would be sinning against my nature and future growth if I stayed there, so after the two weeks, I left.
So, you can see, from the worm’s eye view, everything was pretty good, but from the bird’s eye view, it didn’t look quite as good, so I eventually left.
That is what the bird’s eye view can do for us. It can give us perspective and help us reorient our lives if we need to.
One purpose I have for writing my articles is to take the bird’s eye view of things, be they personal or collective. Gaining that perspective can give us insight into our daily activities, calm us down and allow us to see things more clearly.
These articles do that for me, I hope they can do that for you.
