The Beauty of Little Things
We are living in a competitive world where everything has to be great and perfect. We became a racer and compete among a thousand other racers.
We tell ourselves that “We have to be the best and get the first prizes”
Society has constructed their own versions of norms, even sometimes we tend to disagree with them, success has become a word that everyone praises. The one reason why we woke up in the morning and went home in the late evening.
Though everyone wants to be successful at something in their lives, the definition of success itself is very subjective.
Some people define success as being rich while others might define success as simple as enjoying their lives.
But the society wants us to become more and more than ever, they pushed us to have a better car, a bigger house, a new smartphone, a better career, that's driven us into a new way of thinking that ‘more always seems to be good’
I’m just an average teenager that still trying to figure things in his life, I still stuck in my room writing this article while picturing myself driving a new BMW and enjoying my holiday in an expensive villa.
But the more I think about it, the more I’m feeling insecure about myself, the more I dreamed about it, the more questions that I have to ask myself.
“Is this something that can be true?”
“Am I really will be able to achieve all those things?”
“Will this just leads me to another big disappointment in my life?”
In a perfect story, I will write and write more until I becoming this great author, which lead me maybe closer to my dreams and hopefully achieve all those things.
But I'm tired of living in my own fairy tales, I'm trying to adapt and see things more realistically, involving more and more of my brain rather than just doing it because of my intuition.
Forget about all those motivations about achieving things in life, because that’s the variable that we can’t do anything about it, some people made it which is good for them, and some people just not there yet which is quite unfortunate.
Of course, I need a plan, I need my blueprints written with golden ink to achieve everything that I wanted, but that was good enough for me, either I will be there or not, I have stopped worrying about things beyond my control.
In a very chaotic moment in my life, I found peace within myself from things that I didn’t realize were matters to me.
Those things are the little things that I found in my day.
I woke up in the morning, brew my coffee and then light my cigarette with a Lionel Richie playing in the background, open my laptop then try to write the best words I could possibly think of. That’s happiness to me, as simple as that.
Sometimes I went into the neighborhood coffee shop alone, just listening to my playlist and swirling that espresso into that vanilla ice cream, listening to the sound of hissing from the espresso machine and people talking in the background, those little things could probably the definition of a perfect day for me.
During the pandemic time, I have developed a new hobby which is walking – I don’t know if it’s a good hobby to be developed especially during the pandemic time – but the most important thing is that I enjoy it.
The lyrics of the theme song from Friends Series “Your love’s life is DOA” describes my whole relationship in a nutshell. I have stumbled into a lot of persons in my life and none of them work.
I have always romanticized my relationships, meeting someone in my life that I will spend the rest of my life with, through my best and my worst days.
To hell that with thought because I never seem to get that to work. So being in a great relationship is out of the picture.
But at some point in my life, I was kind of glad actually where my relationships didn’t work, because I have more time to spend with myself, talking and listening with myself – I always call this hangin’ with my own thoughts.
Looking back at the happiest time in my life, almost none of them involving someone.
I was drunk with my false expectations, where to be happy in this world I have to achieve big things, I was being ignorant and didn’t realize that even the smallest things that happen in my day could make life more meaningful than ever.
As I’m writing this article, I'm in a coffee shop alone, and I’m not afraid to be alone, this is not something to be awkward about, I don’t care about what people thought of this, because what matters the most is that I’m enjoying it, doing a simple thing.
If I wise enough to say anything about life, I will make an analogy of it, life is like that jigsaw puzzle, where we are trying our best to put every piece that we have until it makes one big picture.
We were too busy putting those puzzles and we didn’t realize that everything has its own limit, when it comes to time it wasn’t an exception, before we even got to finish the puzzle we will be running out of time already.
I have met a lot of people in my life, people with great ambitions to do something big or even huge. Learning from them, I have one big conclusion about life.
You are more likely to spend your life chasing one of these things,
Career, love, or skills.
The law of economic introduced by Adam Smith, that there are many things that we want to buy, in fact, he mentioned that as a human being it's almost impossible to be satisfied, and yet our capital – or power – to buy those things are limited, we have to prioritize it.
Just like our time in this world.
Knowing it's best that we can choose all those three things and make our life as balanced as possible, but that’s impossible, we tend to focus on one subject only.
But that doesn’t mean if we choose a career, we will completely numb of love and skill, it’s just that they are going to be less developed.
It’s also doesn’t mean that people who chose love over skill and career are better, it depends on what do you think will bring happiness to your life.
If being rich could make you happy, then do it, if by loved by your family could make you happy then do it.
Though it's something that could take months or even years until it's coming true, we can try to think of little things that happen everyday in our lives, things to be grateful for and enjoy as much as we can until we reach our long-term goals.
Sometimes we often wandering in the dark, out of the direction, and that’s normal because at the end of the day there will always be a place called a home, where it will greet us and brew us a good espresso, that little place called home is ourselves.
