Discovering The Human Panoramic App

The other day my wife, Coizie, and I were exploring a new trail that opened up to magnificent vistas of the sun dappled ocean and nearby islands covered with fir and cedar trees.  In the face of this beauty I dropped my mind chatter and just was mesmerized by the spectacular scene. 

It suddenly occurred to me to use an app on my iPhone called Pano.  This app allows you to take any number of photos side by side and then it will stitch them together into a single panoramic shot.  These photos were able to capture the 180-degree view in front of us the way my usual single photo couldn’t.

Later, looking at these amazing photos, I realized that humans already have this app built into them.  I like the metaphor of shifting between a single shot, very narrow view to a wide-angle, full view in our experience.

Sometimes our focus on the world in this present moment collapses in on something we are thinking about in such a way that it creates a feeling of discomfort.  We leave the present moment and our focus narrows down to the examination of a specific perceived problem in the outside world. We get caught up in thoughts that lower our spirits.  We are preoccupied.  We are dwelling on the past or worrying about the future.  Or we are trying to analyze our way to clarity or solution.

In other words, we are caught up in our personal thinking in a way that is not being truly helpful.  This thinking creates feelings of unease, struggle, uncertainty, doubt, stress, or upset.  We become wedded to our personal thinking and limited by what these thoughts allow us to see or know. We become close-minded. In this sense we are no longer open to any new thinking. 

Bring on the human panoramic app!  Realizing that these feelings are simply being created from thought wakes us out of the trance of our personal thinking and throws us back into the panoramic view of the present moment.  This reflex to let go of what we now know to be the true source to our psychological pain is built into humans!  As we wake back up to the present moment we no longer keep thinking the way we were.  We fall into a wide-open, panoramic view that immediately becomes receptive to new thinking and a broader perspective.

It is easy for all of us to forget that we have a panoramic app.  We all get caught up in our thinking and attribute our feeling to something outside of us.  But the more we catch onto this the more we seem to open back up to new possibilities.  I am grateful for those times in the day when my feeling wakes me up to the thinking I am doing that is unnecessarily narrowing my capacity for new thinking and a big picture view.

In the openness of our panoramic view we are no longer confined to the limitations of our personal thoughts, ideas, and beliefs.  We are influenced by newness and we can now be informed by possibilities.  Enjoy discovering this very human app and the breadth and beauty of its views.