There are pains in life that none of us escape.
A parent dies.
A family member gets cancer.
Someone you love gets sick.
A marriage ends.
A friend dies far too young.
These are the real things.
And the older I get, the more I realise how useful it is to remember that when dealing with everything else.
Because we are incredibly good at turning small problems into enormous ones.
An unhappy customer. A difficult email. Someone saying something about you. A deal falling through. A mistake at work. Money lost. An argument. Something breaking. Someone not replying. Plans not working out the way you wanted.
We lie awake thinking about these things.
We replay conversations in our heads.
We imagine what might happen next.
We allow something that probably won't matter in six months to ruin the perfectly good Tuesday we're living through right now.
I've started asking myself a fairly brutal question when something is getting to me:
If my phone rang right now and I was told that someone I love had died, or that someone close to me had cancer and only had a few months left, would this problem still feel important?
Almost every single time, the answer is no.
Suddenly the angry email doesn't matter.
The money doesn't matter nearly as much.
The disagreement seems ridiculous.
The thing that was consuming your thoughts five minutes earlier becomes background noise.
Obviously we cannot live every day imagining that somebody is about to die. That's not the point.
The point is perspective.
We already know what the genuinely difficult things in life look like. Most of us have experienced some of them already, and unfortunately there will be more ahead.
So why voluntarily give the same emotional weight to things that don't deserve it?
Deal with the problem in front of you.
Make a decision.
Do what you can.
Accept what you can't control.
Then move on.
Don't give a R100 problem R1 million worth of your peace.
Life is going to give all of us some genuinely difficult days.
Don't waste the good ones worrying about things that really don't matter.
Thanks for taking a moment to slow down with me this week.
Simon 🤟
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