Sometimes we have to distance ourselves, but not get away from everything and everyone, we do it to see ourselves from another point of view, to separate ourselves from it, eroded, affected by apathy. We must give ourselves a new impetus, find the void, or move away those hidden forces that need to be awakened and reoriented.
To understand this idea, let’s think of something very simple that we do every day: look up and look at a certain point in the sky, in our city, in a park, in the distance. Ergonomics specialists at work remind us, for example, that it is recommended that every 15 or 20 minutes we remove the computers from our eyes and look over the monitor itself.
“Do I feel so isolated that I feel the distance between me and my presence?-Fernando Pessoa-
This visual distance favors rest. Likewise, moving away from ourselves at some point also generates psychological and emotional well-being, but how do you do this to get away from your own self?Wherever we go, our thoughts, our essences and the weight of our entire existence are always there, like a suffocating excess of luggage, like a tireless noise that prevents us from thinking clearly.
Don’t you need to travel to Tibet or make a week-long retreat in complete silence to find new perspectives, separate yourself and have a conversation with him?
Some people think that escaping is like going on vacation, letting problems lose strength and intensity with a week at a spa, with a few days on the edge of a turquoise beach, well, what we usually do in these placid breaks is just escape, but nothing is solved on its own by putting life on the edge of a heavenly setting where you just don’t think.
Escaping doesn’t mean running away from what we don’t like or what distracts us, not if we finally go back to where we’d stopped before, Lao Tse said there’s really no greater distance than us. establish ourselves between our heads and our hearts, that is, between what our minds persist in making us believe before what the heart asks of us.
So what we do very often is try to perpetuate situations that, far from being personally enriched, deprive us of the opportunity to be happy. A job, a relationship, a family environment, they are all contexts in which we are often trapped, attached to negative dynamics. We put so much distance between us and our real needs that what we urgently need is not a one-time trip or a getaway. We need to rediscover ourselves.
You have to learn to distance yourself to rediscover yourself, to see life in perspective, as explained by Viktor Frankl, father of logotherapy and survivor of several Nazi concentration camps, in his book The Doctor and the Soul. It is necessary to form a kind of distance from our environment to regain our sense of freedom, our potential and, in turn, to remember our goals.
Most of the time we are prisoners of our own thoughts, this scenario is almost like a windowless prison, a hostile environment where it is very difficult to know what is out there, so and to facilitate the aforementioned distance, You must be in contact with our emotions to find enough impetus to generate changes.
There would be few steps to achieve this, to shape this personal distance from which it is possible to find greater inner clarity.
Establishing an observational position on oneself is a therapeutic strategy that can be of great help to us, it consists of climbing steps above ourselves to look at ourselves, lovingly, warmly and humbly, it is like a game in which we become observers of ourselves to think about where we are in our lives and what we want to do with them.
If we do not like what we see from this remote position, if we only notice the sound of negativity and unhappiness, it will be time to think about some changes, now these changes must be orchestrated for our purposes, as Viktor Frankl said: we must be able to find meaning in our existence and reorient it towards that goal.
So don’t hesitate to get away from everything around us from time to time to reach new perspectives, remember who we are and what motivates us.