Marcus seems to have had a habit: when things felt overwhelming, he’d pull the camera back. Not a little, but a lot. He'd picture himself from above; first from above the the city, then the continent, then the whole revolving Earth, and then the vastness of time stretching before and after his brief life.

From way up there, most of his worries looked a little sillier than they appeared to him at eye-level.

Marcus wasn't trying to pretend his problems didn't exist (or didn’t matter). Not hardly. Instead, he was trying to put them in perspective.

Most of the things that ruin our Mondays are small when viewed from the right distance, because the right distance includes far more context in-frame. The rude email, or the meeting that went sideways. The rude people in traffic, the spilled coffee on our pant leg, the passive-aggressive comment our spouse made to us last night that we’re still ruminating on 12-hours later...

These sorts of things feel enormous (or, at least, important enough to be worth our time) in the moment because they're pressed right up against our face. Step back a bit, though, and they start to seem less so.

Step back a few miles and they're barely visible.

Step back far enough and even the people we're most angry with are consumed by the context of how minuscule we are as simple creatures doing their best on a small rock adrift in the vastness of space.

Our problems still matter, absolutely, but "mattering" is a spectrum and we tend to place everything at the extreme end of it by default. The view from above helps us to correct this mistake by contextualising things a bit more appropriately.

The next time something feels too big to handle this week, try to zoom out. Imagine the scene from a kilometre above, then from orbit, then across the galaxy. Notice what anxieties or negatives emotions remain after that shift and which things do not.