Problems and Inconveniences

If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you’ve got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One needs to learn the difference.

The above quite by Robert Fulghum put life in perspective for me when I read it. I can’t afford to take life too seriously, or else, I’ll have a serious problem on my hands i.e. the problem called ‘a heart attack.’ Not everything is really all that serious. Not everything requires the level of energy I pour into it. Not everything has to be handled personally, some things I can delegate and some others I can just ignore alltogether. I must learn to tell the difference between these classes of things, be more deliberate about the priority I give things and be more judicious about the amount of energy that I invest in things. Otherwise, I would end up with a real problem and all those things that I felt were crazy important would begin to pale in comparison.