What is the BIG picture? A picture is a frame around a single view. In photographic parlance it is a single photo, a shot. The big picture is what is outside this shot. The surrounding. The big picture is everything that didn’t fit into the picture frame.
The picture photo freezes and frames both space and time, so that what appears within the picture frame is a static shot that leaves out the rest of the view that the photographer can see when not looking through the narrow view-finder of the camera. The picture also leaves out time. The frozen picture does not show the past, what the picture looked like in the spring, summer or fall—or the future, what the picture might look like after the forest fire, child’s smile or wedding is long past.
A picture is a view of the world, the big picture is a larger view of the world. A picture is what we see, what we focus on and seek to make sense of. The “whole” does not make sense as a whole, other than in some mystical acceptance of “it”, it only makes sense when we look at a part and then see the connections it has with the rest of the world. When we apprehend or sense the world it is always the part that we sense. When we comprehend the world we see the connections that our picture has to the bigger picture of which it is a part. We sense parts through our senses and our mind puts them together in a model replication of the whole. It is the bigger picture that our minds create from the sensory inputs of the parts that they receive form their eyes, ears, nose, mouth and touch. The Big picture is what all this fits into.
The bigger picture is context. The BIG picture is context of the context. The biggest picture is the context that everything fits into. The biggest picture that someone can sense, apprehend or comprehend is a function of the model(s) they use for representing the totality of existence. These models are or can be based on religion, science, hearsay, experience, or folktales. “Creation stories” are big picture cosmologies or models that seek to provide people with a big picture in which to put their pictures and bigger pictures.
Big picture: the larger the perspective the more we are all one. Step back and see our connections.
What is the context for peace? What is the big picture that peace, social and economic injustice and the root causes of poverty and war fit into? How can we use this big picture perspective as a powerful and empowering tool for social change? How can the big picture bring people together? How can the B-P be used to discover creative solutions top conflict poverty and global peace? How can the b-p empower us as leaders?
The big picture is necessary to tie your shoes, and to take a step. We need to know where we are to know where we are going. Trivia needs to be connected to the next thing to make sense. The next thing needs to be part of a model of reality for us to get from here to there.
The big picture is needed to make us happy. If you are sad, the bigger picture allows you to put your sorrow in a context that does not belittle it, but ennobles it. The bigger picture allows you to transcend sadness by seeing that there is something else. Sorrow has a context just as joy. The joke is shifting contexts: taking something from one system and putting it in a new context. Joy is the bigger picture. The bigger the picture the greater the joy. Sadness is the small picture. The smaller the picture, the more isolated you are, the more sad you are.