Here in San Jose, the city is not the most beautiful. In fact, it can be quite dangerous at times as well as polluted, loud, and crowded. However, there are beautiful mountains all around the city. When you look up to them from the city, you sometimes have this strange sense of serenity.
Somehow, we tend to live our whole lives on the city level. We are distracted in our own world. We are busy, stressed, and become tired very quickly. We actually sometimes believe there isn’t life outside of the city. All our priorities, anxieties, hopes, and dreams are surrounded what is going to happen in our own little village.
However, when we get to the mountain our perspective changes. All the things that were so vital and important in the city all of a sudden lose their priority and significance. We finally see life clearly. We see the world from the big picture, not from our limited perspective. The city can be a lot of things in our life; it can be the anxiety in our mind, the stress in our lives, or the importance we put on the trivial things. I am convinced the most important thing we can do in life is return to the mountain. If we do not live from there, we are going to get very burnt out, tired, depressed, and stressed very quickly. However, if we do learn to spend time at the mountain, all that seemed so pressing and important becomes trivial in light of the bigger picture.
Albert Schweitzer once stated, “Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter — to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.
And as Albert Einstein put it, “When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about.”
When we look at life from the mountain, life becomes clear. If we could start looking at the world through God’s eyes, nothing would ever be the same.
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