Great Big Things are what seem to constitute a fulfilling life. Relationships, marriage, home ownership, family, school, careers, hobbies, vacations, moves… High points others may skim from our obituaries someday. But these Great Big Things are often vague and imprecise summaries of what truly matters to us.
Focusing too broadly on the Great Big Things can lead you to squander moments, hours, days, and even years as you drift, drift through major life experiences passively, expecting them to accumulate into something significant. Letting moments happen instead of trying to happen within them.
Great Big Things aren’t solid stretches of life you get to replay. In reality, life is a constellation of fleeting moments you get to remember. So the way to experience Great Big Things is to capture the little things happening along the way. To zoom in rather than out.
“I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind.”
~Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air (Book)
No matter where you’re at in life, you’re probably in the midst of a Great Big Thing. Be intensely present, if only for a few minutes a day. Try to help the meaningful moments stick, even though most will fade.
Our lives are the moments in which we are able to tack body to soul, being to present. That’s all we get, and it can be more than enough.
“An apple appeared from a deep pocket in her smock. ‘Happen to have a spare Granny Smith here, to tack body to soul while we wait.'”
~David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Book)
“She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things — the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.”
~Hyperion, Dan Simmons (Book)
