Do Small Things Matter?

In worrying about the big things, are we forgetting the little things that could make a tangible difference to our lives?

Do small things matter?

The tiny, little everyday irritants in our lives that we can fix but never get around to because there are more important things to fix, do they actually make much of a difference to our lives?

I think they do. Perhaps more than I realised.

My biggest achievement this Christmas was that I changed the wiper blades on my car. Please don’t laugh. Those blades had been annoying me for months, scrapping across my windshield and my patience every single day. What a relief it was to get rid of them finally!

Buoyed by that sense of achievement — have you noticed how good, how remarkably good, it feels when you finally do something that you have been putting off for ages? — I did one or two other things that had gotten under my skin. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say with only minimal exaggeration that all of a sudden my life felt different. The day brightened up. It even stopped raining (it really did).

So this is what I am thinking now. In worrying about the post-Trump world, about Brexit, Syria, Afghanistan, the world of Modi, the world after Weinstein, climate change, the Middle East, the Rohingya crisis, in worrying about all these big bad things that drive us all insane, in trying to fix the wide world out there, don’t forget the small things in your lives.

Those matter too.