Philosophizingasdfjkl;

Sometimes, in life, it takes another person's perspective to get clarification. 
Which is of course a very broad and obtuse way of saying that today I got a fantastic, cut you to the bone, touch your heart and heat your blood compliment from a friend I'd lost touch with.  And it gave me a sense of rightness with the world.
Not because I have a giant ego and need that kind of vaildation regularly.  I hope...
No, because it speaks to the thinks that I hold on to personally in times of strife, conflict, and uncertainty.  Not being particularly religious or full of faith, I tend to hang my hat on the fairly flimsy hook of the nature of the universe in dark day.  Somewhat less comforting that some great omniscient paternal figure promising me goodies for following the rules, my ideas about the nature of the universe are ill formed and personally conceived.  So they are much  easier to dismantle in times of stress. 
I mean, if I mentally constructed a fragile world view using scraps from physics, statistics, and a smattering of other religious and spiritual ideologies, how reliable can it actually be?  Especially when I'm the joker that got me into whatever mess I happen to be in this minute.

So when a close friend I'd lost contact with for the last few years tells me that watching me love people helped her find the love in her heart that she wanted to give and receive, and how has with her significant other...well, shit.  No amount of iced coffee is going to keep this bitch from crying.

Fragile world view?  Validated. 

Which just serves as a reminder of the absolute necessity of perspective.  You cannot see everything when you're right on top of it. Whether you're talking about personal life, work problems, or paintings by Seurat, you occasionally need to back away, take another perspective, perceive things differently to truly see and solve them.

In my humble opinion.  But I rarely hear of epiphanies derived from endless hours of obsession.  And it is so dark up close.  Step away, get some light, some space, some laughter.  Take the opinion of someone farther than you can go, consider it in the sunlight, and decide how it suits you.  That's my personal advice, derived, like most of my philosophies, from smatterings of science, art, philosophy and old fashioned life experience.   I truly try not to wax philosophical in public, where people who have no interest in it can be unnecessarily exposed to my mental wanderings, but it was a really good compliment.  And she was a really good friend.  And, truth be told, it's been a pretty hard year.