All the Small Things (for Josh and Myra)
Hi! I’m here to whack some truth upside your head. My truth, that is, and to be perfectly clear I’ll quote you some obscure zen saying: something true isn’t unless its opposite is also true. Chew that. Ah, you are looking confused, you must be a fast learner. Me, I was too stubborn for years to get confused, that way you learn nothing. So, small things. That’s what I’ll talk about today. ‘cos You, dear reader, might totally have the wrong idea. Just like blink-182 (all lowercase, yes, because they figured that that once was cool), whose only hit titles this post, whatever it was, they didn’t get it. Check their lyrics if you need proof. What they díd get was how to perform All the Small Things live at the VMA, with twenty dwarfs.
So, small things. Enjoying the little things. Laughing with your daughter about a raspberry, or enjoying the shade of a!some trees and a cool breeze together with a friend on a hot day. Listening together to a song, reproduced by appalingly expensive loudspeakers. Being content with a small box of raisins, like Zoe, or being content with the last mignardise at the end of a sublime nine course dinner, like me. Your very first paycheck, earned by working on the land when you were fifteen, or the very first investment of the ALS Investment Fund, that you have dreamed of and worked on since you were 36. Blowing a dandelion puff ball.
I don’t see any difference in size between these examples. Do you? I’m guessing that most readers would file “laughing with your daughter” under “enjoying the small things in life”, and a megalomaniac dream of A HUNDERD MILLION €’s not. To start with the obvious mistake: how can playing with your child EVER be a small thing?! She is the most important thing in your life, playing with her is the icing on the cake, the cherry on top, the dog’s bollocks, after you changed her diaper for the tenth time today, and after she emptied her cup on your back as you were kneeling to clean her dinner from the floor and after she kept whining and whining until you almost went crazy and after she kept you up all night and … etc. Or worse, that you had to watch someone else doing that all day, because they can, and you’re paralyzed.
Small things in life are small like the top brick of the Pyramid of Cheops is small. I don’t consider giving Zoë the bottle a small thing, because I am conscious of the enormous pyramid that this moment is the top brick of. All the little events I mentioned have that in common; huge things, each a pyramid of its own, even the dandelion. Some pyramids are more visible to the naked eye than others, which causes unsuspecting viewers to think of one thing as a small thing and another as a Big Thing. Watch closely, the next time you blow out a dandelion. Do you see the sun and the rain that raised it? The millions of years of evolution that led to exactly this specific piece of DNA? The factors that brought you here, at this perfect moment, at this exact spot, to aid this dandelion in its procreation as you breathe its seeds onto the wind?
If if you see all that, then you see that an investment fund isn’t bigger or smaller !than a dandelion. Then, you finally understand: happiness is found in really big things.
