Steppes Towards a Clearer Perspective

I'm not saying that one person’s problems are more real or more serious than another person’s, except… well, yes, I kind of am. Lol 😆

I spent much of last night frazzled and angry because my internet wasn’t working properly, and my screen was frozen on a close-up portion of the photo you see above, mid-edit.

It was maddening, but after a while (and with nothing else to look at) I decided it was almost as if The Universe was telling me to STOP EDITING — stop focusing on colors and textures— and really consider what it was I had photographed. Consider the details of these people’s reality.

What would it be like to live in a house way up on that stepped hill? Even without potable water or electricity, do they wake up every day and appreciate that they’re surrounded by such unimaginable beauty?

Well, with my broken internet, was I thinking about how lucky I am to live in America, surrounded by so many other many luxuries and conveniences?

The answer to that is… no. No, I was not. 🥴

I was grumpily headed up to a coffee shop to continue working.

“Oh wow! Does Apple allow you to edit your screensaver?” a person in the cafe came up and asked me. “Can you show me how to do that?”

Talk about perspective.

I had pondered these (imaginary) Nepalese people's life to the point of basically deciding their existence was all but impossible, perhaps even miserable. They had no toilet or tv, and in between dealing with sick chickens and noisy children every day, it was all just stinky latrines and runaway goats. Right?

But here this outsider, looking at my photo from afar, mistook it for a setting so idyllic, so beautiful, that a computer might try to feed it to our eyeballs at work to take our minds off our own problems. A beautiful daydream. A screensaver.

I stopped pitying these imaginary people and immediately wondered how these very real people in Nepal might feel to learn that they were living inside someone else’s idea of paradise.

And all this because my internet stopped working for an evening.