About This Author
My name is Joy, and I love to write.
Why poetry, here? Because poetry uplifts its writer, and if she is lucky enough, her readers, too. Around us, so many objects abound to write about. Once a poet starts with a smallest, most trivial object, he shall discover that his pen will spill out what is most delicate or most majestic hidden inside him. Since the classics sometimes dealt with lofty subjects with a lofty language, a person with poetry in his soul may incline to emulate that. That is understandable. Poetry does that to a person: it enlarges the soul and gives it wings. Yet, to really soar, a poet needs to take off from the ground.
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Daily Cascade #1095919 added August 25, 2025 at 1:55pm Restrictions: None
Mountains and Molehills
Prompt: Perspective
"The difference between a mountain and a molehill is your perspective."
Al Neuharth
How has your perspective on life changed as you’ve grown older?
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How does my perspective change about life? "Let me count the ways." In fact, my perspective changes all the time, unlike other possibly normal people whose perspective-changes may have more to do with their life events or the passage of time.
In the long run, although I think I am quite resilient in general, the way I feel about life has more to do with how I wake up each morning. I mean, when my first thoughts go from, "Wow! How lucky! I'm still here!" to "Aaaargh! Another day to deal with!" So my mountains and molehills can be closely related to how I wake up each morning. Although, once I get going, that first thought in the morning can shapeshift an awful lot, as well.
Regardless of what I think about me and my handling life, the mountain and the molehill metaphors have a lot to do with the mindset. A “mountain” represents something overwhelming, daunting, and seemingly impossible to overcome, while a “molehill” is something small, manageable, even insignificant. When fears, anxieties, or frustrations, even small problems are exaggerated, they can loom large and cast long shadows. This is not a too terrible thing, by the way. It helps writers an awful lot.
I can say this very easily, especially because, at the moment, I am reading another Haruki Murakami book. If it weren't for that far-out exaggeration of his and other good writers, where would literature be, today? Don't you think? Plus, don't we all bask in the long shadows cast over us by such writers?
Yeah, but afterwards, after I close the book before reading the next chapter, I step back, breathe, and view reality with more clarity. What is unsurmountable in the book or in my life shrinks into something I can handle. So I guess that's how perspective shapes reality, and what I label as a crisis might simply be an inconvenience with the right frame of mind, if and when I can find where my mind is.
As to the part in the question "as you’ve grown older," I had to laugh. Older has nothing to do with good perspective. I have seen five-year olds with much better perspectives than (ahem!) eighty-some-year-olds.
Maybe someday, no matter the age, we'll all learn that many “mountains” in life are, in fact, only molehills waiting to be stepped over. That is, if this new techie thing, artificial intelligence, doesn't beat us to it!
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