I’m sure you’ve heard the saying that someone can’t “see the forest for the trees.” Basically, what this means is that someone is so focused on the small items (trees) that they can’t see the big picture, they can’t see the entire situation (forest).
I recently had to deal with someone who put this into an entirely new perspective. He was so focused on negative things that had happened to him decades ago, that he couldn’t see anything else. He was so obsessed with how people had “done him wrong” that it warped his perception of what had really happened. All he could focus on and talk about were those “dead trees.”
There are problems with focusing on just the dead trees. The trees are dead. We can’t bring them back to life. What is done is done. We need to grieve as necessary, learn what we can, but at some point we have to move on. We need to cut down the dead trees and focus on our live trees.
If we don’t move on, if we continue to obsess over dead trees, we will never see the live trees in our forest. We will never appreciate the healthy trees. And we will never be able to help the trees that are becoming sick, we will not be able to make them healthy again because we will not notice them.
Also, we will never be able to see that we might have a beautiful, vibrant forest if we never stop focusing on the dead trees.
Do you sometimes focus so much on the dead trees that you can’t see anything else? Do you want to change your focus?
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