Difficult Times? Perspective to the Rescue

I’ve been seeing and talking to patients for over 25 years now. That’s roughly 125,000 patient visits. That’s well over one hundred thousand patient stories. Plenty of stressful lives. Lots of tear jerkers. Illness, injury, death of loved ones, work stress, financial disasters, legal problems, abuse and infidelity. Tons of life stories that at first glance it appears that life couldn’t get any worse. It saddens me that some of these people are truly so depressed.

We’ve been looking at how keeping a positive attitude and remembering to focus on faith helps with our day to day problems. Perspective can also help us to cope, but it can be used to our great disadvantage as well. Perspective is a disadvantage when we examine the situation from our everyday perspective (i.e. the current life here in the United States).

A modern perspective leads us to the following types of thoughts:

• I need to have things like so and so down the street (keeping up with the Joneses)
• It doesn’t get any worse than this
• I need this problem fixed…NOW!
• I don’t have time for this
• If it wasn’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all
• If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they fix or heal my problem?

Face it; we are spoiled from great abundance and modern technology when compared to our forebears. Even the poor in this country are relatively well off compared to other countries. Indeed, you don’t hear of anyone in this country starving to death (at least not due to lack of supply-there may be other social factors).Also, there are medicines and treatments that will help alleviate almost any symptom (maybe not cure but at least provide some relief). The poor in this country often have microwaves, cars, clothes, and get warm meals and shelters. (Before you think I’m insensitive, please consider that I’ve worked in inner city hospitals, and I’ve even had to collect cans so that I could eat that day-so I do have some experience).

Now compare your modern life to that of Daniel Boone who had as stressful a life as anyone I’ve ever heard of. As you may recall from past blogs, almost everything you could ever think of happened to Daniel Boone: fought in a war, shot, attacked by bears, panthers, and Indians, personally kidnapped, daughter separately kidnapped forcing him to go rescue her, son tortured to death, robbed-which caused him to be $20 million in debt, sued, blazed his way through the wilderness and later accused of being a traitor to the people he led. Certainly for anyone who is having a stressful life, Boone would probably gladly trade with you. (In fact, Boone might just be glad to be alive again.)

Keep in mind that the average life expectancy during Boone’s time was in the 30’s. He was used to seeing women die in childbirth, young kids die of illness, people crippled for life from injuries that are treatable today. If you’ve ever had pneumonia, gallstones, your appendix out, or a C-section, then you probably wouldn’t still be alive if you were living during Boone’s era. He did not have electricity, heating, air conditioning, transportation, comfortable and abundant clothes and housing. He would have had to hunt and farm daily in order to eat. I think most of us have gotten so soft that we probably would have starved to death if we had lived 200 years ago. Indeed, my idea of roughing it now is staying at the Holiday Inn. I thought I was going to die the week I had to stay in a bunkhouse with my wife’s family…next time just give me a bear to wrestle and call it a day.

No, instead of lamenting our current situation, we should look at our lives from Boone’s perspective and just be grateful for everything we have. Giving gratitude to God will help to lift us up. It won’t make our problems all go away, but it will help how we react to them.

I encourage you to find a perspective that will make your current problems to be not so bad. Using your ancestor’s perspective can definitely help. Next time we’ll take up the eternal perspective.