Distancing: Relativizing Things To Find New Perspectives

Sometimes you need to distance yourself, but not to get away from everything and everyone. We do this to see ourselves from another perspective, to separate ourselves from that eroded “me”, touched by apathy. We need to give ourselves a new impulse, to find from the void or from a distance those hidden forces that must be reawakened and redirected.

To understand this idea, let’s think of something very simple that we do every day: look up and fix our eyes on a certain point in the sky, in our city, in a park. In the distance. Ergonomics experts at work remind us, for example, that it is recommended that every 15 or 20 minutes we take our eyes off our computers and look over the top of the monitor itself.

This visual distance promotes rest. Likewise, moving away from ourselves at any given time also generates psychological and emotional well-being. However, how do you do this to distance yourself from your own being? Wherever we go, our thoughts, essences, and the weight of our entire existence are still there, like a suffocating excess of baggage, like a relentless noise that keeps us from thinking clearly.

There is no need to travel to Tibet or go on a weeklong retreat in complete silence to find new perspectives, to break away from self and have a conversation with him…

Distance to meet again

Some people think that getting away is like going on vacation. That the problems lose their strength and intensity with a week in a spa, with a few days on the shores of a turquoise blue beach. Well, what we usually do in these restful intervals is simply escape, but nothing is resolved by putting life on hold in a paradisiacal setting where we just don’t think.

Leaving doesn’t mean running away or putting ourselves miles away from what we don’t like or what takes our calm. Not if in the end we go back to where we left off before. Lao Tse used to say that, in reality, there is no greater distance than the distance we ourselves make between our head and our heart. That is, between what our mind persists in making us believe in front of what our heart asks of us.

So, something we do very often is to try to continue situations that, far from enriching us personally, deprive us of the opportunity to be happy. A job, a relationship, a family environment, all are contexts in which we are often stuck, attached to negative dynamics. We put so much distance between ourselves and our real needs that what we urgently need is not a trip or a punctual escape. We need to find ourselves again.

Learning to look at ourselves with perspective

We need to learn to step back to rediscover ourselves, to see life in perspective. Viktor Frankl, father of logotherapy and survivor of several Nazi concentration camps, explains this in his book The Doctor and the Soul . From time to time, it ‘s necessary to form a kind of detachment from our surroundings to regain our sense of freedom, our potential, and in turn, remember what our purposes are.

Most of the time we are prisoners of our own thoughts. This scenario is almost like a windowless prison, a hostile environment where it becomes very difficult to know what is outside. Therefore, and to facilitate this distance mentioned above, we must have contact with our emotions to find enough momentum to generate a change.

These would be some steps to achieve that, to shape that personal distance from which it is possible to find greater inner clarity.

Distance from yourself to make decisions

Establishing a position of observation about yourself is a therapeutic strategy that can be very helpful for us. It consists of climbing a few steps above ourselves to look down on ourselves in a loving, warm, and humble way. It’s like a game where we become self-observers to reflect on where we are in our life and what we want to do with it.

• Step onto the balcony of your consciousness to look down on yourself in the distance. Assess whether what you see pleases you, ask yourself if in a year you would like to see yourself in the same way.
• Reflect on your beliefs and your judgments without the classic ego defenses, without the certainties that others have conveyed that have somehow limited us for a long time.
• Check the style of your thoughts, put on a negativity detector to let you know if the approach you apply to your reality is characterized by constant discomfort, despair, moodiness and apathy.

If what we see from this distant position does not please us, if we only notice the noise of negativity and unhappiness, it will be time to think about certain changes. Now, these changes must be orchestrated for our purposes. As Viktor Frankl said, we must be able to make sense of our existence and redirect it towards that goal.

Let us not hesitate, therefore, in distancing ourselves from time to time from everything around us in order to reach new perspectives. To remember who we are and what motivates us.