The Book of Joy

said, we can even see our own role in any conflict or misunderstanding.
By stepping back we can also see the long view, and have a clearer
understanding of our actions and our problems in the larger frame of our
life. This allows us to see that even though our situation may seem
challenging now, from the vantage point of a month or a year or a decade
these challenges will seem much more manageable. When the
Archbishop was awarded the Templeton Prize in London, I had the
opportunity to meet the astronomer royal of the United Kingdom, Sir
Martin Rees, who explained to me that our Earth will exist for an
equivalent amount of time as it has taken us to go from one-celled
organisms to human beings—in other words, we are only halfway through
our evolution on this planet. Thinking of our world’s problems in this
long sweep of planetary history really is the long view. It puts our daily
concerns into a much broader perspective.
This wider perspective also leads us beyond our own self-regard. Self-
centeredness is most of our default perspective. It comes quite
understandably from the fact that we are at the center of our world. But as
the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop demonstrate so powerfully, we also
have the ability to take on the perspectives of others.
I remembered the Archbishop wondering if the person who had cut
him off in traffic might be rushing to the hospital because his wife was
giving birth or because a loved one was dying. “I have sometimes said to
people,” the Archbishop said, “when you are stuck in a traffic jam, you
can deal with it in one of two ways. You can let the frustration really eat
you up. Or you can look around at the other drivers and see that one
might have a wife who has pancreatic cancer. It doesn’t matter if you
don’t know exactly what they might have, but you know they are all
suffering with worries and fears because they are human. And you can lift
them up and bless them. You can say, Please, God, give each one of them
what they need.
“The very fact of not thinking about your own frustration and pain
does something. I don’t know why. But it will make you feel much better.
And I think it has therapeutic consequences for your own health, physical
and spiritual. But what does frustration help? I mean, you feel it in the pit