Don't sweat the small stuff

Life is fragile, much like a travelling box with "this way up" printed all over it to make sure over-enthusiastic couriers don’t smash the contents.

I don’t know about you but, when things are going swell, I tend to forget about the big, important bits – I bitch and moan about the small stuff, gossip, nag, procrastinate, worry about saggy boobs and fret about myriad irrelevant details that, in the long run, are about as pointless as trusting politicians.

Last month, for instance. Our kettle broke again – sixth one in less than three years. Shock, horror, foaming at mouth and tea-less for almost a day. Everybody and his uncle knew that I was boiling cuppas in the microwave because I let ‘em know: the world owed me sympathy for being deprived of creature comforts.

And trust me, I’m all for quality appliances and decent equipment – no retailer gets away with selling me a dud, even if it was on special for R59.99 – but did I truly, honestly have to spend an entire day whining about it? No, because it’s all about perspective. Sure, your shattered Ming vase has caused a family tiff but for anybody not related to you, who cares?

Well, you do – and that’s okay. But trawling the story through Facebook as though it ended your world is a telling sign that in the 21st century, we’re a sorry bunch.

And it’s not just about “being positive”, either. We seem to be barrelling, collectively, in the opposite direction.

As columnist Songezo Zibi wrote this week, ours is “becoming a society that lacks the very necessary ability to listen intently and to analyse sentiments we might be in violent disagreement with”.

What does this mean, exactly? Simply that we are trigger-happy, in terms of skewed or exaggerated negative reactions and opinions. Slogans, as Zibi explains, have replaced books, with people developing “intense emotions on the basis of a 320-character online post or a teaser to a news story they have yet to read.

“They attack or defend positions they have not even seen. The prevalence of such intellectual attitudes makes us ripe for demagoguery to take root.”

We’ve become so used to being offended, upset, outraged and spitting mad because, I believe, it’s never been easier for us to express it, thanks to social media.

Keeping things simple, I believe, is a first step towards stopping the madness. My friend Ross says that if we don’t live life with a capital “L”, we’ll wake up at the end of it with nothing but an overdraft and bad teeth.

Wise oke. Today I have cherished my loved ones and am trying to be present in the time that I spend with them. I’m trying to laugh more, rather than morphing into dragon lady because we’re late for x’s whatever or y’s event, or owing to what I’ve read online, in a brief headline, and which I cannot alter, influence or change anyway.

I reckon you don’t need to be a cheesy Pollyanna or Ms Congeniality all the time to get the purpose of existence. But you do need to be able to flop onto your pillow most nights and say: today, even just for today, I have no regrets; and the world isn’t always as bad as it seems.