Why do we do precious little to nurture, develop, grow and protect all those things that come free in Life while ending up working 60+-hour weeks ‘earning a living’ and trying to cling on to, protect stuff, that in the end are impermanent, dispensible, unimportant, forgettable and replaceable?
Category: Richard Carlson
Romance Life to see how loving you really are!
Just as you can learn swimming, cycling, writing, you can learn loving too.
Overcoming small irritations and injustices by giving the situation and the perpetrator love, instead of anger, is how you practice loving. A motorist tries to cut past you and creates a small traffic jam but ends up blaming you. Don’t respond with a how-dare-you look. Smile and say it was just an ‘oops!’ situation. At a busy check-out line at a store, someone edges past you and the cashier does not insist that you must be allowed to bill first. Don’t agitate. Smile and say these things happen! Your boss holds you singularly responsible for the team’s poor show though you have put in several extra miles. Don’t grieve. Pray for your team and your boss.
Our daily Life is peppered with several hundreds of opportunities__or call them nanosecond tests__to practice loving. In that nanosecond you have to make a choice. Do you want to respond with anger or practice loving instead? When you practice loving, you learn forgiving__or, as Richard Carlson would say, you learn how not to sweat the small stuff. How you deal with the small things in Life is what determines how you deal with the big things. The interesting aspect of practicing loving is you don’t have to become loving. You are love and you are capable of loving. The only thing that comes with practice is that you become more aware of this capability.
Just like Mother Teresa and Gandhi and now, Narayanan Krishnan, personify love, so can you. Because you are that already. Just that you don’t know it. The love in you doesn’t just need some lemon and honey, it needs practicing. Romance the travails of everyday Life, and see how loving you really are!
Indeed. Without doubt, it’s all small stuff!
Between wanting to be right and doing what is right, and what is best in a given circumstance, choose the latter.

It is possible my choice is debatable. But that’s what, I believed, was the best thing to do in the circumstances.
As I drove away, I thought to myself: ‘How would I have handled this situation just 10 years ago?’ Surely, I would have stood my ground. I would have been seething with rage. I would have insisted that the gentleman was at fault. And the episode would have dragged into a saga – involving an accident complaint, an insurance claim and a burning desire to prove myself right and the other man wrong. And then I thought deeper, would my being right in a street brawl, have really mattered 10 years later, to this New Year’s Day of 2014? Certainly not! I guess that’s what evolution as an individual is all about. I felt good that I had evolved, even if marginally, over the years!
Often the biggest hurdle to individual evolution is the desire to want to control outcomes, to prove oneself right and to hold on to opinions. Focusing on the merits of each experience is perhaps a good way to ascertain and convince yourself if such clinging on is really worth it. I have learned that answering three questions really help making an intelligent choice in any circumstance:
- Will what you are fighting for really matter some years from now?
- What is best for all parties involved – letting go or proving yourself right?
- Which stance – letting go or clinging on – will help preserve your inner peace?
Several years ago, I remember reading Richard Carlson’s fabulous book “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…”. It makes so much more sense now than it did then. I particularly like the second line of the book’s title that says – “…and it’s all small stuff”. Indeed, in Life’s grander, larger, design, everything – absolutely everything – is small stuff. And any fight to cling on to anything is bound to affect your inner peace! Ask yourself, each time before you launch into an ‘I-am-right’ mode if it is really worth it?