It's All About Perspective

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I had an interesting email this morning and I thought I would share a bit of it with my Mylot friends. In it Marc and Angel shared about something they learned in their final lecture at uni. Their professor came on stage and she held a glass of water over her head and asked the students how heavy they thought the glass of water was. Students in the audience shouted out various estimates of the weight of the glass of water. But she replied along the lines of from her perspective the absolute weight of the glass of water is irrelevant. She said from her perspective it all depends on how long she holds it for. Even a relatively light weight will feel heavier and heavier the longer we have to hold it. This reminded me of the of the hammer hold in the World's Strongest Man competition when the contestants hold a 30 kilo hammer with both hands straight out in front of them at shoulder height. The 30 kilos is an easy weight for these guys to hold but not for them to sustain for very long. The world record for holding this hammer is 62.68 seconds. Paul Smith holds this record and if you go to YouTube you can see the strain on his face almost from the beginning. The Hammer event measures not only a man's physical strength but also his mental strength, his ability to block out the pain. So back to the glass of water and the point, the weight of the glass of water does not change, but the longer you hold it the heavier it feels to the one who is holding it. The professor then likened the weight glass of water to the weight of our negative thoughts, thoughts like thoughts of frustration, anger, resentment, bitterness, betrayal, hatred and the list goes on. In the beginning we can hold them in our minds without doing too much damage to ourselves, but the longer we hold them the heavier and stronger they get until in the end they will overwhelm us, and consume us. Just as with the physical weight the only way to get relief is to drop the weight so too the only way to get relief from the mental stress is to drop those negative thoughts before they become all you can think about. I thought this was worth a share and gives us something to ponder on, please share your thoughts on this.