You may be capable of great things. But life consists of small things. – Deng Ming-Dao
My wife Robbie thanked me last night for being ‘sweet’ during the day. This surprised me because I hadn’t really been conscious of doing anything deliberately ‘sweet’ – I’m the type for whom ‘sweet’ does not come naturally… I generally have to plan for it. Jeez, could it be that I’m making some progress?
As I think about it, my ‘sweetness’ was actually more related to an absence of my usual behaviors. She got the MTX virus on her PC by opening an attachment a couple of weeks ago and I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to get her machine stable since then. Yesterday, I decided to install a Windows upgrade to see if that would fix it, and instead of my usual snorting and swearing as one thing after another went haywire, I just kept at it, treating it like a puzzle. Since she was already feeling bad about mistakenly opening the attachment, she’d have felt worse and probably responsible (mistakenly) if I was getting exasperated with trying to fix the damn thing.
Later in the evening, we went to the video store with our daughter to rent a movie. It was kind of late and I was tired, so I figured an action/adventure movie of some kind would keep me awake. Ah, Gladiator! But since it was an R, and my daughter wouldn’t be able to watch it with us, I decided to forego my choice in favor of hers. So instead of being obstinate, I just figured, “No biggie” and that was it.
So when we snuggled in for the night, Robbie mentioned both of these things, and the rest of the night was very ‘sweet’ indeed. Yessir, “…life consists of small things.”