People always say that in order to enjoy life you have to find pleasure in the smallest things. I have long been skeptical of that mindset. As a naturally depressive person, I am used to being swallowed up in the big picture and neglecting the trees in the forest. What difference do the small things make when the world is clouded in fog and misery? I'm used to focusing on the big picture and all the minor details blur together in a cloud of meaningless nothing.
Then November 2024 came.
It's been almost a month since the worst possible outcome of this year's election happened. The big picture became shrouded in maybe the greatest darkness the world had seen in a long time. The news cycle has been dominated with in-fighting, terrible leadership choices, possible coups, an assassination attempt, and hypocritical moral outrage. Being a political person has never sucked more than the current moment. And for the first time in my life, I find myself so overwhelmed with the bad news that I'm actively tuning it out. I have always prided myself on being informed but at this point it's become so bad and unbearable that I have to tune out for my own self-preservation. I can't survive the next four to however many years and try to weather and fight the worst of it if I'm bogged down by the onslaught of misery that is the news.
This is when I started noticing the little things. The small details of my life and the world suddenly became amplified. The shine of my dog's fur. Pomegranates at the supermarket. Hot apple cider with whipped cream. The amplified sound of the grooves on the records I play. It's as if I was gifted a giant microscope and everything small became huge and in focus. I can see all the intricacies in every crack and spot and how beautiful it all is. It's challenged my cynicism and created a galaxy brain moment like I've never had before. Maybe it takes the world feeling out of control for the tiniest things to be magnified.
It's hard to process the concept of "love the small things" to deal with the problems of the world. It feels condescending to be told to seemingly favor the small when the world is bigger and more complex. But I no longer think that appreciating the details means forgoing the greater picture. It's not mutually exclusive - it kind of goes hand in hand. In order to keep going in this increasingly chaotic world it feels necessary to find joy wherever you can find it, no matter how insignificant it might seem. The small things is what helps us survive day by day so we can tackle the big issues life has for us. This is why person-to-person professions and activists emphasize self care so much - if we can't take care of ourselves we can't handle life in general.
So I'm holding space for the small to tackle the big. The wide smile my dog makes when he wants to play. Cups of piping hot tea with honey. The coziness of my sweaters to warm me up in my cold apartment. Old movies on streaming. Scented candles. It all sounds basic, but basic is what saves us from despair. Basic keeps us going. Basic is what we fight for to keep the worst from happening.
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