The world is too big to see all at once.

There's just too much going on. Every day. Everywhere. From continent to continent, over oceans, first this country then the next, this city or town, this neighborhood, our block. This house. Wars and crime and big decisions on the climate or the economy that have to argued over and decided. Domestic violence. Our own kids suddenly becoming adults. Us getting older.

We can't keep up with it all. At some point, we have to decide how much of the world we want to be most engaged with and which we would just as soon not hear any more about. It's a tough choice but one we have to make. I mean, we're all allotted just so much time on the planet -- how much we're never sure until it's too late -- and, really, just so much energy to expend.

Where do we direct it?

Well, of course we first have to direct our view to our own family. Be sure they're all okay. Next, we might turn our attention to our job, which may or may not requre us to pay attention to what's going on in the world. More likely it requires us to pay attention to what's going on under our noses at any given time of the day.

So we get off work and drive or ride home. Pay our respects to the husband or wife or significant other or just cat or dog. Eat supper.

And . . . then what?

Here's the big decision most of us make without realizing we're making it. What to do with the off-time we have? Let's say you need to go to bed at eleven to be able to get up at six or seven for work. That leaves you three or four hours in the evening to spend however you please. If you have kids, you may be down to one hour or none. Which means that you may not even be able to watch the news and find out what happened in the world while you were at work.

You may wake up tomorrow totally ignorant of some big event.

So how do busy people keep track of what's going on in the world?

They make choices. Or the choices are made for them. Or the choices just sort of evolve. I had a doctor friend once who told me that since college he had read nothing except the medical journals in his particular field. So much for the wider view to be gained from reading newspapers, magazines and books (including novels). His world view was defined by the career choice he'd made. It was narrow but deep.

On the other end of the spectrum, I've had friends who spent almost all their spare time traveling. They wanted to see as much of the world as they could. Of course that meant that they saw very little of the immediate world around them: their town, their neighborhood (and neighbors), their own backyard. Their view, unlike the doctor's, was wide but, in the end, shallow; they never got to know any country or any place in any depth. You'll notice that anthropologists and sociologists, among others, eventually have to settle on one or a few parts of the world or of society to do their work; there's simply not enough time to study it all.

Even the speculative world, the world of thought, is too big to consider in one lifetime. If you've ever known a philosopher -- whose passion is thinking about thinking -- he or she was undoubtedly an epistemologist or an ethicist or a logician or whatever; again, focus had to be narrowed to keep from going crazy trying to take it all in. Same for psychologists, who are concerned with human behavior: some time in their schooling of careers, they have to decide which behaviors to study, knowing they can't study them all.

But often we don't make those decisions consciously. They just happen to us. Depending on what we choose to do for a living and who we choose to marry and where we choose to live, our world view simply evolves and becomes such a part of us that we probably couldn't describe it if pressed to do so. I'm a liberal not because somewhere along the way I had a revelation that we all need to share our resources, etc. I just gradually began acting that way because it seemed right. You didn't come out of the womb a conservative; the way your life unfolded colored your thinking so that one day you simply found that that's who you were.

But the main point I want to make is that we should occasionally take a look at our lives and our world view and see if there ARE some choices we can make. Instead of letting the world view we've developed determine who we are -- which it will to a large extent anyway -- we should see if there are decisions we can make that will broaden, or deepen, our world view. My son used to study atlases. Why? He liked to. To this day he knows where more countries are almost anyone I know -- and he's hardly been anywhere, except in his own imagination. He traveled in his mind.

The world as we know it is huge. To visit all its parts, you'd have to fly on planes and cross oceans and take buses -- which often fall into ravines -- and even hike, with full gear, for the rest of your life. And you still wouldn't have seen everything. You have to make choices. The world of the mind is just as huge, maybe huger; you have to make choices as to what you read, what you study.

And that doesn't even take into consideration the world of nature, which you also can't live long enough to see all of or being to understand. From microscopic life to black holes -- with giant trees and endangered frogs in between, not to mention us humans -- you can't, in one lifetime, explore that great unknown. That's why scientists limit themselves to the in-depth study of only one or a few things -- often something as seeimingly insignificant as a particular kind of worm or fly or even microbe. Of course that doesn't mean that don't also enjoy a good movie or a meal out of a novel from time to time, not to mention the company of friends, etc. But they do these other things to varying degrees, depending on how much of their precious time they choose to devote to their professional interests.

Choice. It all comes down to choice. And if you don't make those choices yourself -- and aren't aware you're making them -- they'll just happen anyway. You're going to spend a certain amount of time on this planet -- how much of it is spent doing what you choose to do and seeing what you choose to see is up to you.

Take the job of President. He (no she yet) is probably the most powerful person in the world. But he has only a window on the world, too. Granted it's a much bigger window, but it's still not a clear and complete depiction of the whole world at any given time. It was already constructed for him, and when you consider what he has to give up for that view -- time for friends and family, time to read what he wants, time alone -- I'm sure that when his term is over he'll be glad to give it up and build his own window.

Just like the rest of us. We all have to craft the window through which we see the world -- the world around us, the world above and below us, the world inside us. We can try to make it as wide as possible, or we can make it small and put in magnifying glass that lets us see deeper but which cuts out most everything on the periphery.

I guess a case could be made that the astronauts have had a view of the whole world (at least one side of it). They all commented on the beauty of the earth, its blues and greens and whites, but of course what they couldn't see from that altitude was the abundance of life down here, which is the most interesting thing about the planet.

So pick your piece of the puzzle. Decide what part of this immensity you want to study, which is important to you. It may just be your job and your family. You may want to tune out the news of the world. Or you may only be interested in news items that further your cause. In any case, if you don't think the world view you currently have is sufficient, head on down to the hypothetical hobby store and pick out the frame through which you want the world presented to you. Choose carefully: you'll see nothing beyond the borders.

Remember to get the biggest one you can afford. And keep the glass clean.















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