Life is a Sum of Small Investments

Life is made up of an innumerable set of little things that explain the whole and the great. There is nothing in this universe, no matter how large, that is not made up of small elements that give it meaning and essence.

The objectives are achieved by conquering small goals. Large structures are built by adding pieces. Wisdom is made up of a vast body of knowledge and experiences. Society is explained by people. Life is made of moments.

For some cause embedded in the depth of his psyche, a man directs all his capacity to the achievement of the great, to the understanding of the totality.

This is the yardstick by which you measure your results and satisfaction.

In the journeys, you undertake through life, origin and destination matter. The journey is only an unavoidable requirement, the important thing is to leave and how beneficial to arrive. Living like this, his own existence could be better explained only by two facts: being born and dying.

And existence is, of course, much more than that, just like the universe that covers it. The fact of being and living in the sum of innumerable and precious moments. Of small sensations, of fleeting events.

The average life is made up of two and a half billion heartbeats and each of them is essential to ward off death. The concept of the great, the illusion of the majestic or imposing lack their own essence. Rather, they are the product of the association of many small parts.

The big, in itself, does not exist, only the small exists.

Tiny things give life to the big, however, the latter does not give life to anything small. The whole universe is made up of simple things. Wonderful but tiny particles create larger structures and phenomena.

The “road of construction” of all things goes from small to large. It never makes reverse sense. Anything you want to build must start from a detail, from a small thing. And as others are added to it, the great body takes shape.

The lives of people, organizations, works, success (as well as failure), happiness, bitterness travel this way. Everything moves from the small to the large, from the part to the whole.

The very fact of existing is explained by its details, its moments. For their small senses of existence, with a lowercase “e”.

At the end of life, when a man feels unable to imagine and wish for a remote future, he clearly understands that his entire existence is explained and justified only by “moments”. There he perceives that dramatic reality of having lived and enjoyed little. He realizes that the race for the great has consumed “little time”, the precious detail like ravenous fire.

An anonymous friar from a Nebraska monastery said things like this in his posthumous letter:

” If I could go back to living my life , I would try to make more mistakes next time …”

Do people perceive the cost involved in avoiding error? Do you understand that after spending so much time avoiding it, they hardly enjoy the successes? Can you imagine how many opportunities in life you miss just trying not to miss? Do they conceive the degree of freedom that they resign?

The fear of error must be outlawed! Eliminate this prejudice! Through error, the way to success is found. Whoever makes the most mistakes better dominates the path that he travels. The mistake is a sign of movement, of life, far from the paralysis that causes fear and guides mediocre souls.

Mistakes are small investments that generate huge returns. Without them there is no learning, knowledge is never mastered, or character is built.

“If I could relive my life, I would relax, try to be more human and more foolish than I have been in this life …”

Tension, that storm caused by anxiety, kills the little moments. The tense man resembles a piece of cloth that is stretched hard to gain strength, but a weak blow is enough to tear it.

Curiously, in a “relaxed” and serene state, one is more solid to face adversity. In this way, the blows are better assimilated, processed, and resolved.

But being “relaxed” in the face of adversity may seem silly in a superficial world that finds virtue in permanent “readiness”, in immediate remedy.

How many years wasted just for not “looking silly”! For complying with formats and conventions. Give satisfaction to foreign parameters. How much life and how much energy wasted in avoiding ridicule! To conclude, being neither one nor the other.

So distorted is the sense of “the human” that man understands more about the importance of caring for a species of whales in the ocean than the need to be “more human” with himself.

Everyone should allow themselves to be a little dumber! Because that will make them a little freer and happier. Life puts a daily “corset” on everyone to “take care of good sense.” And most of them are carried away by that “current of sanity”, forgetting that a swimming pool is better enjoyed in a bathing suit than with a jacket and tie.

“If I could live my life again, there are few things I know that I would take seriously …”

It is difficult to understand the relativity that things have. In the midst of the daily rush, each moment of life seems the final minute of a game in which everything is determined. Things that couldn’t be more absurd in context take on superlative dimensions. And all this takes away the quality of life and its small components.

Peter Drucker advised, “taking work seriously but not taking yourself too seriously.” And in this there is a fundamental reflection: take things slowly and not “embody” them. Because tomorrow always comes with answers and fresh air.

Nothing is finally as bad as it seems and nobody is as weak as calculated.

When a 100-year-old man was asked the secret of his longevity, he replied:

“For the possible I did everything, for the impossible I never lost a second of my time.”

Most of the things that men “take very seriously” on an average day lack transcendent meaning and only cast a shadow over what really matters.

They say that for dogs (those adorable creatures), men are “the only animals that laugh.” And for so much effort to be “serious”, they will conclude by not having “nor a dog that barks at them.”

“If I could go back to living my life I would have more real and less imaginary difficulties …”

Man is also the only animal on this planet that has the gift of “imagining” what the future will be like. But this gift, which on the one hand serves to be an active agent in defining his future, is also a painful rod when associated with what it may bring him.

Instead of spending as much time as possible on the conscious, the “here and now,” invest valuable time and “non-renewable” energy in ” imagining problems .” And this disquisition haunts him.

“Futurology” is one of the stupidest things humans do. Because from it he multiplies his problems “ex officio”. Add to the real those “imaginary”, and nurture an uncontrollable orgy of pre-occupations.

Here basic arithmetic has the capacity to provide peace and quiet:

You must SUBTRACT imaginary problems from the set and keep the balance (if it exists).

Why not channel your imagination to solve real setbacks and leave a bit of work to your own destiny? It is the privilege of the idle man to imagine problems and not work hard to solve those that knock on the door.

“If I could live my life again, I would try not to live each day many years ahead of time …”

The not always well-understood character of life has forced many behavior patterns to be developed to deal with uncertainty.

There are three letters that perfectly describe these cares, the letters PRE. They explain the meaning of the adjective PREVIO or the verb PREFER. Concepts such as prevent, worry, predetermine, anticipate, premeditate, predisposition, preconceive, etc. emerge from them.

These words become life orientations. They end up “prevailing” over other concepts and leave higher value considerations aside.

The quality of life is closer to the men who care than to those who care.

Determination wins more in life than the act of predetermining.

The feeling is more important than feeling.

Meditate better than premeditate.

The disposition outweighs the predisposition, and the charm of conceiving does not resemble the fact of preconceiving.

Enjoying the short time of life that one has merits living “something” beyond the imperatives posed by the adjective Previous.

Or at least not live by it. Perhaps this last clarification is timely. Because there is no shortage of those who find in suggestions of this type the direct pass to a dissolute life. What in fact is as far from a quality life as the one that conditions the present by imagining future states.

For those of you living each day many, many years ahead, try to answer the questions that Charles R. Swindoll poses in his book “Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back”:

“When did you last sit by the table after dinner, just to relax and have a little fun?

When did you last fly a kite? He took a long walk through the grove. He pedaled a bike in the local park. He drove the car under the speed limit. Or did he do something with his own hands?

When did you take time to hear an hour of good music. Or did you walk on the beach as the sun went down?

When did you last remove the watch from your arm one whole Saturday afternoon? He carried a little boy on his shoulders. He read a chapter of a book in the bathtub full of hot water. Or did you enjoy life so deeply that you couldn’t stop smiling? “

It doesn’t matter who it is, what they have, or how much. If you cannot answer yes to these questions (or at least some of them), what you deserve is to change your way of life, today!

As one tends to think about the future and live each day many years ahead, it would be good to remember the only certain thing that it has in store for us, the one with which JM Keynes approached planners: “in the long term, everyone we will be dead ”.

The only thing that humans have to face the endless battle against their weaknesses is the reason. And his restless daughter: reflection. Nature has endowed you with this for the specific purpose of balancing your emotions and impulses. Reason differentiates man from animals (apart from smile).

Therefore, the best way to change the course of life you lead and bring it closer to quality levels lies in obeying a simple slogan: Stop and think!

If one does not stop, reflection is invalidated by the demands of routine. And if you don’t think about it, you lack the basic control that every human being should have over himself.

Stop everything for a moment and think about this:

• Don’t live a lifetime trying NOT to make mistakes.
• Relax. Try to be more human with yourself. Less foolproof and a little dumber.
• How many things that are part of your life today deserve to be taken very seriously? Reduce them as much as possible. This will allow you to focus effectively on them.
• Take care of the real problems and not those that you imagine exists or may exist.
• Don’t live each day many years ahead. The future brings him closer to inevitable death. The present is a representation of life.