What happens when we give ourselves the space to step back and see the bigger picture?
Sometimes I wonder if we have become a little too obsessed with measuring our lives. We measure our children by their grades, ourselves by our achievements, our careers by promotions and our lives by the milestones we have managed to tick off along the way. We compare, we count and we keep looking at where we are supposed to be by a certain age. But life isn’t really a list of achievements. Perhaps we are so busy looking at each individual moment and deciding whether it is a success or a failure that we forget to step back and look at the bigger picture.
Why do we demand such certainty from our lives? And in our pursuit of certainty, are we sometimes missing the creative part? Perhaps that is where we find what really matters – somewhere between certainty and creativity, between knowing where we are going and being open to where life might take us.
J.K. Rowling captured this beautifully when she said, “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” Then there is the wisdom of Thomas Edison, who, after countless attempts to invent the lightbulb, famously said, “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Two very different people, but both remind us that perhaps we are too quick to decide what a moment means. What looks like failure in one moment may become something entirely different when we step back and see the bigger picture.
This is some of the thinking behind the Big Picture writing for wellbeing course, which opens in the WriteWell Community next month. One of the exercises invites you to write a list of instructions for someone who wants to take up a passion of yours. It sounds simple, but give it a try. There is something wonderfully creative about taking something you know almost instinctively and breaking it down for someone else.
Then, when you have finished, pause for a moment and look back at what you have written. Did the act of creating that list teach you something you hadn’t expected? Did you notice something about yourself, or about the thing you love, that you had never really put into words before?
This idea of looking again is at the heart of creativity. We take something familiar and, by putting it into words, begin to see it differently.
For the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, creativity allowed him to see something extraordinary in something very ordinary. In his poem Digging, he watches his father and grandfather working the land, digging potato drills and cutting turf with skill and precision. What might seem like a simple, everyday task becomes something much more profound. As Heaney holds his pen in his own hand, he recognises his own form of digging: he will work with words rather than a spade.
In that moment, the bigger picture emerges. Heaney is not simply writing about digging. He is connecting himself to the generations before him, honouring his father’s skill and recognising that although his own work looks very different, it carries something of the same dedication and craft.
Perhaps that is what creativity allows us to do. It helps us to look again. To take an ordinary moment, a memory, a mistake or even a difficult chapter and see it from another angle. It allows us to move beyond simply asking, “Was this a success or a failure?” and instead ask, “What can I see here that I couldn’t see before?”
Just like Heaney, go lift the pen and start Digging.
The Big Picture 4-week short course opens online for members in September. Try a free 14-day trial and explore further here.
