Respect the Little Things

If you've ever received professional music training - probably on how to play the piano or some other musical instrument - then you must remember just how structured your lessons were and how you had to repeat pretty basic scales, chords and arpeggios you were sure you had mastered over and over (and over...) again simply because your instructor was insistent on solidifying your foundations and ensuring that you learnt how to play with proper posture, correct fingering and overall solid technique.

“Who ever talks about fingering when the maestros play?” you must have thought. “It's all about the melodies. The sound!”

But frustrating as this might have been for you (because you thought your instructor wasn't teaching you the more advanced and glamorous stuff you knew you were capable of executing) if you stayed with the programme long enough (unlike the rest of us who didn't, sadly) you must realise now how vital to your repertoire those basics still are, and you'd probably insist that anyone under your tutelage (unless you simply didn't like this person) learned them just as you did.

My bet is that this brief narrative easily reminds you of the virtues of patience and perseverance, but I hope it also brings something even more important to your consciousness: respect for the small stuff.

The popular orientation today generally seems in favour of not really minding the less significant things and rather focusing on keeping the big, obvious things as we expect them to be. Maybe that's why we find that it's not at all difficult getting so immersed in our awe of the impressive big picture that we more than momentarily lose cognizance of the microscopic pixels that have come together to so bedazzle us. We gaze at the edifices before us in such wonder that we forget how what we see is really just a conglomeration of building blocks that have been put together over time; and that, without these blocks, there's no building.

But hey! Care to guess what a block and a simple spark share in common (apart from being relatively insignificant on their own of course)? Whereas it takes much more than just one block and quite some time and effort to put up great big structures, it takes just one spark and way less time to reduce everything to rubble.

So you see? Small stuff. All of it.

All habits (good and bad alike) could have easily been one-time acts, but weren't. The world's largest companies all started out as mere ideas, and so did the greatest inventions of all time (the atomic bomb inclusive) but they weren't ignored. Hence Microsoft, and Facebook, and the light bulb.

And Hiroshima.

And no. Goliath the champion of the Philistines wasn't killed by a meteorite. An otherwise flimsy pebble did all the damage necessary.

Need I say more?

With all due respect, please know when to sweat the small stuff.

There's no telling...

P.S.:
1. I'd say being ill sucks, but you know that already.
2. Please don't stop talking to God about the anarchy that's steadily brewing all around us. It's sad how much unnecessary blood has been shed in recent times.

Peace!