| By :
Mark Etinger
I used to never think about wicketed bags or plastic mailers but that's because I was preoccupied thinking about other less important things such as friends and girls. But I realized that the minutiae of the day to day is just as important as the bigger things we treasure. For example, have you ever come home from food shopping and had a tear in a bag and had to watch your groceries spill onto the ground? It's a terrible helpless feeling, and hopefully you're close enough to home when it happens so you don't have to walk with eggs and bananas and cottage cheese coddled in your arms like a baby with people talking about you as they pass, "Oh look at him, his paper bags ripped; he should've double bagged with plastic. The minutiae matters. The big things happen, whether you want them to or not. You make new friends or you don't. You fall in love or you die alone. These things follow a course of action that you have little control over. Whereas the little things, like what you should have for dinner can actually make a big difference. Let me explain. When you're deciding between eating in or going out, there's money at stake. You spend more for a tasty, faster meal. But this can become a habit; you may soon be spoiled by eating out and want to do it every day and there goes a serious chunk of your weekly earnings. This prevents you from taking that trip to the Far East, but it's okay you tell yourself, you'll do it eventually. Except years go by, and you think maybe you didn't want to do it all that much anyway. This becomes a regret over time. You wish you had gone to the Far East when you were younger, before you met your wife and kids and had to pay for their college tuition. So you see the minutiae, such as what kind of plastic bags you use and whether or not you get your newspaper delivered dry every morning in its cozy little newspaper bag, these are the things that affect us, because they do so subtly, over time. We create habits, determined by our tendencies and our decisions, which we may not consider at first, but which creep, creep up and come to dominate our lives. Big decisions usually regard other people, since humans are social and when we make a "big" decision, it usually influences the way others perceive us and the resulting relationship we share with them. But these things cannot be controlled. You cannot worry about what your neighbor thinks when he sees you reading your morning paper. You can only decide what to do yourself and those little decisions, although hard and seemingly simple, retain more meaning through your conscious choosing them. Leave everything else to the fates.
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