The Monet Principle: Finding Clarity Through Engaged Distance
In the quiet basement of Paris’s Musée Marmottan, surrounded by the world’s largest collection of Monet paintings, I discovered a profound lesson that speaks directly to how we navigate today’s fractured society.
Standing inches from Monet’s masterpieces, I could only see fragments — chaotic brushstrokes, thick impasto, colors that seemed disconnected from reality. But as I stepped back — two, four, six, even ten steps — something magical happened. The Father of Impressionism’s complete story — in all its beauty and complexity — emerged. Let’s take a look at Monet’s 1882 painting, La Place a Pourvelle Soleil Couchant -
Close-up of the brush strokes —
Two steps back —
Four steps back -
Six steps back —
Ten steps back —
This experience mirrors how we consume the stories of our world. We live immersed in fragments — a headline here, a tweet there, a sound bite that supposedly captures an entire truth. We become embroiled in these partial narratives, allowing single impressions to define our understanding of complex realities. We mistake the brushstroke for the bigger story. And more so, we disregard the frame that supports the painting, and the framers that created it.
My colleagues and I speak often of creating circles of belonging by getting people to pono (right relationship) and creating conditions where everyone can bring manifest their gifts and thrive. This requires the same practice I discovered in that Parisian basement — the discipline of stepping back to see the whole. When we retreat from the immediate emotional pull of breaking news, when we resist the urge to form complete judgments from incomplete information, we create space for something else to emerge: perspective.
Monet understood this paradox of perspective. His canvases demand movement from the observer. Stand too close, and you see only the raw mechanics of creation. The story emerges not despite the distance, but because of it.
This principle — what I’ve come to think of as engaged perspective — has profound implications for how we consume and interpret information in our hyper-connected world.
The result is a kind of informational myopia. A single headline becomes our entire understanding of a crisis. One viral video defines our perception of a movement. A tweet crystallizes our view of a leader, a nation, a party, a people. Here are some actual headlines taken from major news sources in the past week.
This isn’t an argument for detachment or disengagement. It’s a call for engaged perspective — the conscious choice to step back not to avoid involvement, but to deepen understanding. To see the painting as Monet intended.
The irony is profound: in our age of instant information access, wisdom may lie in deliberately slowing our consumption. By cultivating patience to let full pictures emerge, we can resist the impulse to form complete opinions from incomplete information.
Distance isn’t always about physical space. Sometimes it’s about time. Sometimes it’s intellectual humility. And sometimes it’s having courage to step back until stories reveal themselves in their complex truth.
Consider how different our world might be if we applied this methodology to engaging with each other’s stories.
- What if we applied Monet’s methodology to our media consumption?
- What if we deliberately cultivated the discipline of engaged perspective?
- What if, before responding to inflammatory posts, we stepped back to see full contexts of people’s experiences?
- What if we allowed space for multiple truths to exist simultaneously, like different colors on Monet’s canvas that only make sense when viewed from proper distance?
When the world feels overwhelming, when news cycles seem designed to fragment your peace, remember Monet’s gift. Step back from whatever narrative demands your immediate reaction. Let the full story emerge.
In that spacious pause, you might discover something more inclusive, more hopeful, more powerful than what you initially held. You might find the very conditions that allow transformation and healing to begin.
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