THE BIGGER PICTURE

"Take a step backwards and see the bigger picture." That's how it is when you're living outside of your own life for a while, isn't it? You see the points where the canvas meets the frame, you see the contrasts of the dark and the light; you see the brush strokes you live in, and you see with a wry smile, that they all look rather small from 3,000 miles away.

The truth is though, that even from out here, even from another time zone where time itself seems to have slowed down to walking pace, there is always another picture - and it's much bigger than you imagined.

"Time stands still in Niagara," said Nick, driving home down the 401, "It's awesome."

"But that's how I feel about this whole trip!" I exclaimed. 

The last six days might well have flown by in the UK (I don't know) but they feel like two weeks, maybe three, here. I've been on holiday before; this has never happened. It's really quite a wonderful time dilation, though it is flashing like an indicator lamp on my dashboard.

How absurd is my normal life that it flashes by at double-Toronto-time? Have I left any breathing room? Have I slotted in to that drizzly old rat race just to keep pace with the right face? Why?

Or, is there something deeper going on? Is there a bigger picture still, encompassing this culture, that culture and me, even though I'm standing thousands of miles away from my normal life? What really matters? What's really important?

I am aware that it would be all too easy to see this time zone as a kind of anomaly where the sun shines, the sky is blue and strangers make eye-contact with unafraid smiles. It is that, but it's much more - plus, I'm wearing holiday goggles of course. There is always a bigger picture.

And so I wonder what happens if you keep on taking steps backwards, if you keep on looking at things from further and further away? There is bound to be a bigger picture, encompassing the big picture; there are surely more important things in the larger frames that remind you that the things in the frames you see are just brush strokes on a canvas, pixels in a photograph and ideas that exist in ever decreasing dimensions. Out you go then, to picture after picture after picture ... until you meet the Artist, where you start to realise what all those pictures of pictures were about. I think it's probably best to realise that that is where to start looking for perspective rather than where to finish.

The long straight road stretched ahead, vanishing into the horizon, where a hazy Toronto skyline appeared. I think I know that I don't have to be defined by the time zone - if being here has taught me something, it must be that. It isn't a case of trying to live at Canadian pace in the UK - actually, that can't be done. What can be done though is a reorganising of the picture, finding the brush strokes the Artist intended for me in the first place and living at the pace at which he sweeps them so beautifully across the canvas.