How do you keep things in perspective?

Just earlier today I visited my grandmother, an expert in the fine art of keeping things in perspective. Now in her eighties, my grandmother is a retired school teacher who is keenly interested in the world around her and still sharp as a whip.

“Do you know that every day, enough children die in Gaza to fill an entire classroom with?” she told me when I sat down. I was impressed — the visual was powerful, it struck me. My grandmother has a way of using examples to make otherwise hard to digest information seem more ‘real’, making whatever she talks about more vivid.

It’s all too easy for tragedies to be reduced to mere numbers… it helps us be more detached from them. But when you compartmentalize, visualize and make a story come to life, the detachment ends. Suddenly, a one is a person, and a thirty fills a classroom.