The View from Above is what psychologists call a distancing or minimisation technique. It’s a method of zooming out from your life, placing it in a cosmic perspective, and thereby gaining a measure of detachment. We say that anxious or depressed people ‘make a mountain out of a molehill’, zooming in on their problems until each little obstacle seems of enormous and terrible proportions. We can practise doing the opposite, zooming out, widening our perspective to cosmic dimensions so that we make a molehill of every mountain.
