Tiny Moments

Life’s fickle nature can change in an instant.

Recently, I had a pretty slow day at work. All through the morning and just after lunch, I barely had any sales to speak of. Then, in a window of 8 minutes, I received a few emails that changed the course of the day and the next. Just as quickly as those were opened, the rest of the day went back to the slow pace it started with.

Those brief moments made me think about how drastically our lives change in an instant.

We’re all aware of the high profile shootings around us. We know how a terrorist can alter an entire nation’s psyche in a matter of minutes. There are those terrible calls telling us something bad happened. We also have the good things which change us. As a writer, an email from a publisher can change the course of your career.

Tiny moments in life can have the greatest impact.

Sometimes I feel we lose sight of that. We don’t see how those butterfly wings can create a storm. We don’t see the thousands of tiny ants burrowing under a tree. We get wrapped in the big moments of life. They’re wonderful too, but all too often it’s a series of smaller events that have the greatest impact on us.

It’s also in those tiny moments we find what life is really all about. The grand gestures are great, but it’s the small things which make it all work. When you consider long term relationships, it’s not the great romantic gestures that bring the couple closer, it’s the thousands upon thousands of small daily events that strengthen the bond. And it’s also small moments that can weaken it, sometimes happening in a quick moment like with the emails I described above.

Things change quickly. We have to be ready for that. We have to be aware of the small events around us and how much of an impact they make. If we neglect those, we might be losing out on something special.