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I love a good party. I love organising and bringing people together. It’s exhausting and weirdly therapeutic. Watching people eat, talk and laugh together. But time and time again, I find the key lies in the small details. The colours, the positioning of the table, where to keep the cutlery, placing the drinks in a place away from the food.

Making an experience easy and dare I say joyful. Ensuring the right colour flower is there to contrast the pastel decorations. I don’t know if anyone noticed, but it all comes together and what a joy it is to behold. The capacity to think out the bigger details is important, but ironing out the details is what clinches it.

But how important is it to get the small details? We’ve always been told not to sweat the small stuff, but isn’t the small stuff where success truly lies?
I looked back a few of the moments that have meant a lot to me, when I have felt the most loved and taken care of:

My mother – who is a disciplinarian – got me a beautiful butterfly clip with gold wiring and beads on it for my eighth birthday. It sure beats the year my father got me a calculator.

The time when my father took me out for ice cream just the two of us. Although he ordered a peach melba (I would have loved a chocolate sundae.) the moment has stayed with me.

The first time the love of my life, said hello to me.

My husband holding my back when I was in labour.

Seeing the bottom of my laundry basket

These are precious snippets of my life. The point is that they are snippets. Big actions do not necessarily bring about big meanings. It’s the small stuff that does.

Our lives are structured by milestones, but filled up with many moments, and they are the ones that allow us and give ‘meaning’ to our lives. But milestones are unpredictable little buggers. There are some that elude us irrespective of our relentless pursuit of them and some that we attain without even trying. So, milestones cannot be reliable markers of value or meaning of life.

I have come to the conclusion that the meaning of life is not found in the milestones we achieved, but in the method in which we live our lives. The method then facilitates those little actions which bring about greater value to our lives. It is not only in the ‘seen’ that our lives are valued by it is the value of the ‘unseen’, the smile of compassion, the nudge towards success, etc.

Allow the small ‘unseen’ things to mean a lot. It makes life simpler to enjoy. And only the brave do that.

Aasiya I Versi