Kim Gaskill scrapes ice off her windshield on her porch in Bella Vista, Arkansas and asks whether you clear just a small box to see through or wipe the whole thing clean. She uses it to argue for broadening your perspective instead of narrowing your view.
It is a beautiful day here in Bella Vista, Arkansas. My name is Kim Gaskill and this is the Daily Spark. I am standing out here on the front porch. Sun is rising, the trees are glistening because the sun is shining off of the ice and snow that's starting to melt just a little bit, although it's only 17 degrees. And I do not like the cold, I'll tell you that right now. But I do think that's beautiful when it snows. Snowed a couple inches yesterday, and I am here for a couple of days, and of course they have to be the two days that it snows, which it doesn't do often here in Northwest Arkansas. But I went out this morning and I needed to move my car out of the driveway so my sister could get her car out, and my car was covered with a couple of inches of snow. Now, begrudgingly, I opened up the trunk, got out my little scraper brush thing, and I was hoping that when I ran the brush across the windshield that it would just be that light snow that would brush off. But unfortunately, I heard that sound and it was ice underneath, so I had to flip it to the scraper side, scrape it a little bit so I could see both on the front windshield and the back, so I could see to get out of the driveway. So I backed out, parked the car, and I'm walking up and I'm thinking— I'm looking at the car and just two little spots are cleared off where I could see to back out of the driveway and park and down the street. And I thought, how many people— because I've seen this often— only clear out a little spot like that, then they get in their cars, they take off, and they drive down the road in traffic, and they could get all the way to their destination and still only have those little spots of vision cleared on their windshields. Now, other people you see going down, their entire car is cleared off. They took 5 or 10 minutes, cleaned everything off, made sure their wipers work, have their defrosters on, everything's melting, clear line of vision, the entire windshield. Which type of person are you? Do you only clear enough space to have the vision needed in your little box, in your little space, in your little neighborhood? Or do you clear out that entire windshield, that entire field of vision so you can see the big picture, so you can see what's going on outside of your little box, outside of your neighborhood. Because sometimes we need to have that little focused vision, but most of the time it benefits us more to have a field of vision that is larger to see more that's going on around us, to see more of the big picture, to pick out what we need to focus on for our place in that big picture. So I hope today you think about that. Are you just focusing on that little space that you cleared on your windshield, or are you making that vision as big as possible to see as much as you can around you and take it all in. That's all I got for you today. I'll be with you next time on the Daily Spark.
