Mind, Matter, and Me

I had a moment of healing clarity on my walk to class the other week.

On my walk, I decided to look around me rather than down at my feet or at my phone. In my incredibly brave decision to look around me, I started to feel overwhelmingly grateful for the smallest things. I was happy that the sun was shinning, I was happy I was wearing shorts, I was excited to go to class and sit with and see all my friends, I was grateful to be listening to music, I was content watching people walk by, I was looking forward to going out that night. And most importantly, I was elated to be feeling so joyful.

My brain starting immediately analyzing why this was such an exciting experience for me. I feverishly started writing in my notes app about the revelations I was having and then started to feel giddy that I was going somewhere with something, a topic I could possibly write about. I was then back in the cycle of feeling grateful because I have been hitting a bit of writers block and have been feeling defeated by my lack of inspiration to write. And as I let all these feelings wash over me and I let my thoughts formulate answers to questions I didn’t know I needed to ask myself, I arrived at the conclusion that I have been equating the size of things to the weight I gave them.

What I mean by this is I realized I have been depriving myself of the love for life I used to know so well because I thought things bigger in size were supposed to take up equal space in my head. I thought the bigger the storm cloud, the less sunshine.

But what I have learned is that was the perspective I chose; the power I gave to the things I could not control. What was so transforming about my walk to class, was that I had finally allowed myself the luxury of letting the smaller, more simplistic things of life hold the weight. Size does not equivocate to weight.

There are plenty of big things that happen in life and I had let the hard ones in mine become the heaviest which convinced me that the big things are the most important. That I couldn’t enjoy the little things until the big things were dealt with, solved, or accepted.

What this toxic perspective left me with was anger, jealously, and anxiety. Life was no longer exciting. It was work. My walk to class was a swift mode of transport to a class where I constantly got 1/5 on the quizzes and felt discouraged for 2 hours following the conclusion of class rather than something to be enjoyed or something that held beauty.

Currently, I am regaining the healthier perspective that the small pleasures in life are what make this life collectively beautiful.

I sat with a friend today and we discussed 5 things we were grateful for in that very moment. We discussed the sunshine, the sound of running water, the degree we are about to complete and receive, the company we were in, and the music we were listening to. Immediately following that conversation, I felt fulfilled. I thought about how life can be simple if we let it be. I thought about how in that moment those small things meant more to me than any big thing I might be dealing with.

I hope I continue to chose the small things. I hope I let them weigh more. No small thing is just that, small. It can be so much more if we give it the power to be transformative.

To love the life you live can be hard, but it can also be simple. And I have found the simplicity of it all lies in the appreciation of the small things.

“I thought of the blissful mundanity of life; of what a privilege it was to live it”

– Dolly Alderton; Everything I Know About Love

Your physically not so small friend,

Me