The Forest from the Trees

Last night, my Beautiful Mother and I were filling the car with gas and My Dad's work, and we saw a bunny over in the grass near one of the buildings. It didn't look like a wild rabbit, more like one that you would see at a county fair. So I slowly walked over to it and bent down with my hand outstretched. The bunny skeptically hopped closer and closer until it was sniffing my hand. I then tried to reach out a little farther to pet it's head, in doing so I scared it and set it to running. After it started hopping away, Mom lamented that it was to bad that I wasn't able to catch it, as she thought it didn't have much of a chance in a truck yard. So we got back in the van and right after we started moving, something in the headlights moved. I looked closer and saw that it was a baby bunny, two of them! "I'm glad I wasn't able to catch her," I said, "she's probably they're mother".

Now your probably wondering, "Why is he talking about a bunny?" but hang with me, there is a point to all this.

When the bunny hopped away from me, my first thought was "That's a bummer, I don't think she'll make it out here for very long", but when we got in the car and switched on the headlights, we saw the baby bunnies. So if we had caught the Momma bunny, the babies probably wouldn't have made it. When she ran away, I was looking at one tree, thinking "Phooey". But when we saw the baby bunnies, we saw the forest; the bigger picture.
When something happens that we don't particularly enjoy, the usual first reaction is "Why?", when it should be "What's the bigger picture here?". Often we will only think about how this effects us rather then how it's going to effect others. We hone in on the situation, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but we need to periodically step back and look at the bigger picture.

Paul