Coming Back to the Small Things

It was a Friday night. Lenja and I were on the couch, bowls of food on the coffee table, and Trevor Noah's latest stand up comedy special on the TV. It was an unremarkable evening. Then, at some point in his special, Trevor said something that got me thinking:

"Just because the 'big' is happening doesn't mean the 'small' stops."

The world seems to be on fire, both literally and metaphorically. The news cycle screams. The headlines pile up. Wars, crises, the slow grinding weight of everything that seems to be breaking apart. And yet... we still need to eat dinner. We still need to laugh. We still need to sit with people we love on unremarkable Friday nights.

The small things don’t pause for the big ones.

Earlier this year, I wrote about my experience in the first quarter, about how I had all these grand expectations of myself and how life handed me my ass. What I didn't fully name at the time was why. It wasn't just the pressure of work or the weight of the world. It was that I had slowly, incrementally, stopped doing the small things. Waking up early. Breathwork. Exercise. Journalling. Noticing things. At the time, I told myself that I was focused on what mattered, but I was actually abandoning the very things that made me capable of focusing on anything at all.

When the foundations erode, the structure above them doesn’t collapse dramatically. It just becomes harder to inhabit. You move through your days slightly off-balance, slightly hollowed out. You stop noticing it because the pace doesn’t let you stop.

Coming back to myself didn't involve a sudden breakthrough. There was no single moment of clarity, no dramatic turn. Just a quiet recommitment to the small, unglamorous things that I had been treating as optional.

We cannot work on the big things from a depleted place. Not sustainably. The person who abandons their rituals in service of their ambitions doesn't become more effective. They become more brittle, and brittleness is expensive, in ways that we can only count later.

This year I find myself travelling more than ever before. My rhythms are constantly shifting. I don't have the same rituals when I'm away from home, but I've stopped treating that as an excuse to let the foundations slide. The form changes. The function doesn't. Early mornings still happen. The breath still gets tended to. The small things now travel with me, adapted but intact.

The world doesn’t slow down for us to catch our breath. The crises don’t pause while we rebuild ourselves. Which means the rebuilding has to happen in the margins.

The small things, like a chilled Friday night on the couch, trying not to choke on our dinner while we laugh, aren’t a reward for doing the important work. They’re what make us capable of doing it.

They're also - and this took me longer to accept - the point. Not a means to an end, but the end itself. On our deathbeds, we won't be tallying the hours we spent chasing impact. We'll remember the Friday nights, the laughter, the people we came home to.

We live in turbulent times. The world will keep being on fire. The big will keep happening.

In the meantime, let's not let the small stop.

Until next time,

Ric.