This past week I was going through some of my old chats in Facebook and Google Messenger (GTalk as it was known back then) during my time in school.
There were lots of odd conversations and some petty fights and arguments with a couple of my friends. I couldn’t stop laughing while reading them because it seemed so silly that I would get so bothered and worked up over these trivial matters.
But school was the only world that I knew then and every incident no matter how seemingly insignificant it may seem now, was the most important thing in the world back then.
It never occurred to me then that one day I would look back on all of these and find it hilarious because I could get pretty caught up in the drama.
And while some of those incidents did make me feel bad temporarily, I couldn’t care less about them now because they didn’t have any lasting impact and it was something I had forgotten all about until I read those chats.
If you think about it, so much of life is like this. We usually tend to get upset over small troubles and incidents in our daily lives that wouldn’t even matter by the next day.
A lot of times we focus too much of our attention on small incidents that bother and frustrate us and don’t take the long term view of whether they may make any difference to our lives in the long run.
A wonderful quote that I came across recently, speaks to this point,
“A small trouble is like a pebble. Hold it too close to your eye and it fills the whole world and puts everything out of focus. Hold it at a proper distance and it can be examined and properly classified. Throw it at your feet and it can be seen in its true setting, just one more tiny bump on the pathway of life.” – Celia Luce
Maintaining the right perspective is one of the key ingredients to long-term happiness and it is something I have spoken about in a previous post.
But it’s worth repeating because when we often think about happiness, we don’t imagine it can be something as simple as adjusting our perspective.
I believe we don't need the benefit of hindsight to put our frustrations and troubles in their proper perspective.
When you are feeling upset and bothered over an incident, ask yourself whether this will matter in a week? A month? A year? In five years? Will it even matter tomorrow?
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