keep your problems smaller than life

your life is not the size of your worst week

We are so good at zooming in on the wrong things.

So good at honing in on the bad email that ruined an afternoon, but not the things that actually hold our whole lives together — like the fact that you woke up, or that someone, somewhere cares for you, or that the sun rose and birds still chirp. Those things barely get a passing thought.

When a problem shows up, instead of setting it in context of your whole life to see how big it really is, we pick it up and hold it an inch from our faces. Of course it looks huge, anything does that close. Most problems aren't big, yet we make them big. Hold them so close to our eyes that they take up the whole frame. We hand our plights the microphone and give them the whole stage.

I try hard to keep my problems smaller than my life. Not small enough to pretend things don't hurt, or plans weren’t ruined. Just so that they’re smaller than the life holding them. Because your life is enormous, and it has so many years in it and so many people in it. A problem, even a very real and raw one, is one detail sitting inside something so much bigger than itself. When you lose sight of that, and hold the painting too close, a detail stops being just that and starts being the whole picture.

A few months back I flew abroad to see my friend who had been living there for the past couple years. Before even taking off, my first flight had been delayed and then while in air we routed around bad weather. I held my breath with hopes we’d make it to the next stop in time as there was a connection waiting for me. We were still in taxi to the gate when there was only forty-five minutes left until boarding closed.

My stomach just dropped with the sinking feeling of already knowing the answer yet still doing the math in hopes that somehow, someway it would be fine. There was no version of this equation where I made it off that plane, across the airport, and onto the next one, and I knew that. Disappointment, frustration, and annoyance — it was all there. Someone had changed their schedule that day to wait for me. Of course I was bothered, and leaned into it even as the spiral began to grip me with it’s claws.

But at the end of the day, I had missed my flight. Whether I spent the next four hours spiraling about it or the next twenty minutes rebooking, the gate was staying closed and I was getting on a later flight. The only thing actually up for debate was what proportion I gave that setback out of the entire trip. Nothing about my reaction was going to unclose that gate. I could only choose to let the problem be bigger or smaller than life as a whole. And begrudgingly, this one truly was the smallest of problems.

I think we’re quick to say it’s not that deep over something that does feel deep, I myself admittedly being one of the quickest to shout it from the rooftops, like it magically fixes the situation and your mood. I don't think that it’s a black and white answer. In that situation, I was genuinely annoyed, and letting myself be annoyed for a minute wasn't the problem. The problem would've been considering the trip ruined, not jumping to action to book a new flight, and turning a missed flight into a missed trip that ultimately would turn out just fine.

Because it did. I got a seat on the next flight, texted my friend the new time, and was eating dinner in her tiny kitchen less than a day later than planned. I'm the only one who was ever going to make a missed flight bigger than just that: a missed flight.

That's the part I think we get backwards constantly when it come to the painted picture of our lives: letting one small error overshadow the artwork. The parts where I got there full of excitement, hugged my friend so tight we nearly toppled over, and smiled so hard my cheeks hurt. Those parts get washed out to just become getting there when telling the story. The forty-five minute saga of missing a flight gets a whole story while the whole special moments of reunion get only a sentence. Even just reading this here you know more about my missed flight than seeing my friend for the first time in forever.

In life, you don’t get to fly across an ocean to see someone without occasionally being the person standing at the gate frustrated and tired. There’s always going to be problems in life. When zooming out, those problems become more about how big am I going to let them seem compared to everything else. The hard things happening isn’t up to us most of the time. Plans will fall apart, that’s a given in life. The good and bad, it’s the same life. It’s all one package.

I think about this a lot in the context of the line of tough women I come from, who went through genuinely hard things, much harder things than I probably ever will, and kept going anyway. And if any of them had let their problems get bigger than their lives, I wouldn't be here writing this to you right now. They didn't get to choose easy circumstances. Nine times out of ten those women chose to paint those problems in a smaller proportion. They brushed themselves off, tightened their aprons, or in great oma’s case straighten her strands of fake pearls and braids, and kept on pushing through with grit and grace. They made do with what they had and took what life spit at them.

When you take problems for the size they are, and not bigger than your life, it goes back to being one detail in a much bigger painting. Chances are you are yet to have the worst day of your life, and even when you do have it, there will probably still be another worst day of your life. The size of a problem isn't fixed the second it happens. You get a say in it — whether you use that say or not, use it now or later — you get a say regardless. That is when you decide how big it gets to be.

Next time something goes wrong, let yourself be annoyed, or heartbroken, or furious, then ask yourself the only question that matters: is this the whole picture, or is this one detail I'm holding too close to my face. Almost every time, it's the second.

Your life is bigger than any one detail in it.

It never will not be, unless you let it.

Keep your problems smaller than life so the whole picture can be admired.

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