Relativity

In late October, I returned from my destination wedding in Beqa Fiji. As you can imagine, it was wonderful! The beauty of the ocean and the energy of the Island were instrumental in shifting travelers to a magical space. That ‘space’ didn’t leave room for a hyper fixation on time or control or many of the other aspects that are so commonplace in how we navigate our world. It was true freedom and one of the gifts of traveling to a land that is completely foreign to our own.

I had the resort we stayed at handle all aspects of the ceremony and celebration. This is impressive when one analyzes my personality traits and those of my husband, Joel. Perfectionists, check. Attention to detail, check. Wanting to know how it will all come together, check. But not in Fiji, I was completely on Fiji time (which means you pay absolutely no attention to time!) Liberating for sure. All turned out more spectacular than I could have imagined. And now that I’ve been home for a couple of weeks, I’m wondering how the location of our perspective and the concept of relativity can have such a dramatic influence on the thought or belief we end up with.

Relativity: the dependence of various physical phenomena on relative motion of the observer and the observed objects.

In Fiji it was the relativity of time. Our ability to move through the activities relative to how everyone else planned or didn’t plan their day resulted in the perspective that letting go of the need to control everything was a viable way to exist. The Fijian people were happy, enthusiastic and very much connected to their inner Joy. To them, happiness is a primary motivator for how to live life. For most Americans, the motivator is the execution of squeezing out every viable minute of our day to get as many things done as possible so we can feel like a productive contributor to society, make more money and buy nicer toys.

The notion of Relativity is very powerful and is working behind the scenes in ALL aspects of our life.

Back home I see relativity coming into play with regards to our relationships, businesses, home life, prosperity and navigating gratitude as we head into Thanksgiving. In our relationships we ask questions like “Is this the ideal relationship for me?” “Can this relationship make me happy long term?” If we are someone who hasn’t had a relationship in five years, before that had a few three month stints maximum, struggle with loving ourselves and others than our perspective will be vastly different from someone who has done a lot of personal development work, embodies self love and uses the mirroring effect of relationships to refine the rough edges of their personality.

In business, a person can have recently jumped into the world of Entrepreneurship and find that they want to compare themselves with someone who’s been doing it for ten years. Their world is not going to look the same. Marketing strategy, sales and client base will vary greatly.

In regards to prosperity, perspective is everything! In Fiji the majority of the population makes two dollars an hour Fijian (which equates to $1.02 US). If I’m making 50K a year in the US than from a Fijian viewpoint, that’s a lot of money! However, if I make 50K a year and my closest group of friends are multimillionaires with private jets, multiple businesses and vacation homes in Lake Tahoe, than I’m not doing very well relative to them.

My point

Thanksgiving is upon us. As we head into this holiday of gratitude, we get to decide how we are going to think and feel about our place in the world. If we only use a limited perspective of the marketing we are inundated with, how our family and friends are doing, who is doing better than us than surely we will feel less than. However, allowing ourselves to drift into this zone of negativity is irresponsible. What if we paused to think about the fact that almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. At least 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day. What if we think about the population who is alone without a family to celebrate with? Or the people who don’t have a job or business to ruminate about? Our minds are powerful tools and we get to determine whether we feel like the world is our ally or foe. Relativity determines whether we feel good about ourselves or not. Comparing yourself to a limited segment of the population will never give you the full perspective. This Thanksgiving, focus on the millions of reasons you have to be thankful!