Zooming Out...

I find myself saying this to people a lot lately.  Women I sponsor call me and are having a meltdown over, well, mostly having too much on their plates.  And I am transported back in time when I had little kids, a job, a husband, friends, recovery and so very much to do.  It seemed like I was just a robot, on auto pilot, moving through my life, immersed in the lives of others.  It wasn’t the most fun time in my life.  I felt drained and overwhelmed so much of the time.

I wish I would have thought about zooming out back then.  I didn’t have that skill.  Oddly, that skill came later.  Maybe because I felt so overwhelmed and over extended back then...anyway, I am grateful to have it today!

What is zooming out?

Well, it can be whatever you want it to be, really.  For me, it is the act of taking myself out of my current situation, and zooming out to some distant reality that is not quite here yet.  Zooming out to a week from now, a year from now, ten years from now...and reflecting back on whatever is going on today and seeing it from that perspective.  It, almost always, immediately, changes my feeling of being overwhelmed.  When I zoom out, I can see that whatever is stressing me the fuck out in this moment, will pass and isn’t all that I am making it out to be.  So far, I do not believe that zooming out has ever failed to place whatever I am currently going through in perspective.

I get immediate relief when I zoom out because whatever feels big, unwieldy, and overwhelming is placed on a larger timeline where there is so much more space to breathe and live and exist.  I think we all have a tendency to allow the events of our daily lives to pin us in place.  Like we are so mired in the tasks of every day living that we just get paralyzed and then everything feels like it is going to swamp us...

Zooming out helps.  Removes me from the overwhelm of the moment and delivers me to a place where I am more free to see things with a more accurate lens.  I know from experience that I have never one time done this and come back to the moment and thought that whatever I was just very upset about was worth all the energy and time I was giving it!  Never.  One. Time.

For me, zooming out feels like a space walk, I leave the confines of my present moment and am still tethered to the mothership, but I am able to walk out into the atmosphere and view, well, everything: space, time, the world, my world and it is so quiet.  So peaceful.  And the view, is well, spectacular.

So I go on my little space walks with regularity now.  I move out and away from the here and now momentarily so that I can gain perspective and insight, then I get to bring that back to my present.  I leave panic and dread out there to wherever I zoomed out to and I come back with fortitude and grace.  Pretty decent trade if you ask me!

I can’t always change my current level of stress, insanity or level of busyness.  But I can zoom out.  I can do it as many times as I need to, all day, every day.  And gain a life altering perspective that immediately changes my here and now, even if nothing in my here and now actually changes.  I change and so my here and now must also.  Such a gift. 

Perspective shifts when challenged and I have found there is nothing more challenging than the passing of time, whether it be actual time passed, or just me zooming out to some future date that allows me to see that whatever it is that is happening currently, will change.  Or sometimes, I zoom out to the past, and see that I have had so many challenges in my life, and they have all worked out just fine.  I have survived 100% of my bad days...and so I likely will again.  Zooming out doesn’t guarantee fun, or getting what I want, but it does help me see that my crippling anxiety only lives in the here and now.  Not the future or the past.  And should I need a break from my current reality, all I have to do is take a zoomy little trip and I am granted immediate release from care and concern.

Again, still...