What is life? What does it all mean? We spend most of our lives with our heads buried deep in inconsequential and trivial details, without thinking about the preciousness and fleeting quality of life.

And then something happens that turns our thinking around. We do a complete 360 and see our little mindless, and humdrum drudgeries for what they really are. And then we kick ourselves for keeping our heads in the mindless fog for so long when we could have raised it up into the crystal clear heights above, appreciating how it feels to be alive and feeling gratitude for all we have taken for granted every minute of every day for weeks, months and years.

So when those incidents happen in our lives – though they can range anywhere between inconvenient and catastrophic – they do teach us about how to go about the world.

And if we survive those incidents, they change us forever. We are reminded of what matters in life. And we are reminded that the time we have here on this good earth is short. If we have the luxury of choosing whether to dwell in unpleasantness, or spend time with toxic people, then we should ensure our days are spent that way, away from what is poisonous and grim, and closer to what is uplifting and will allow us to grow into better people. Others will benefit from this, so it’s not just a matter of removing ourselves from the too hard basket of life.

It’s a bit like climbing to the top of a mountain and surveying the view below. It’s all-encompassing. We can see things that are impossible to see from the ground. From up there, we can see how certain features of the landscape are positioned in relation to others. This is impossible to understand when we are at ground level, as we are only privy to what is before us, and there are often buildings, trees or hills in our way that make it impossible to see too far beyond the spot we’re in at that very moment. Even when we’ve moved on and are able to see what comes next, the place from which we’ve come has already faded into an unreliable memory, and cannot be used as part of our roadmap.

So every now and then, even when things are bubbling along smoothly, it’s not a bad idea to take some time out to climb the nearest mountain, and to check out the view from all directions. It might not hurt to spend some time thinking about what the events and people in our lives mean to us, and to make some decisions about the future.

And then, once we get down amongst the trees again, caught up in the fervent to-ing and fro-ing of our bus existence, we will hopefully remember how we and all our supposed struggles looked from way up there. Microscopic, and of little consequence.