We are at permanent risk of losing perspective, of making more of our troubles, hopes, fears and status than is warranted or good for us. One of our greatest terrors is to be made to ‘feel small’, to be reduced in our own eyes by the inconsiderate or thoughtless actions of others. This is to miss that the solution to our agitation does not lie in expanding our importance, but in learning to reduce it even further. Peace of mind does not come from finding an indisputable way of enhancing our status; it comes from discovering a sufficiently elevated and distant angle from which to look at everything we are and do in order to understand that we are blessedly and thankfully irrelevant to everything.
Alain de Botton
