I can't argue with that phrase, "Don't sweat the small stuff." We shouldn't focus on the things that don't really matter. But, sometimes the small things ARE important. More important than they seem. My intent was to talk about something a little lighter this week. I guess that may have been a bit selfish. I have a lot going on in my head this week that it's hard to really keep digging at brokenness at the same time. Lighter would have been easier. But. I couldn't quite get away from it yet. So, Let's go at it and see what we can learn.

So far in this series, I've said that broken things are not beyond usefulness (episode 18) and that a mended life can be beautiful, authentic and worthwhile (episode 19). Today, let's talk about the practice of mending.

Being broken is a state of fracture. When emotions, relationships, bodies, circumstances or minds even are in a state that the pieces have been torn, there's wreckage. It's painful. I know. I do want to recognize that some states of being broken are permanent. They just are. Not everything is fixable the way we want it to be fixed. There are physical issues, for example, that cannot be healed, barring a miracle. We have to realize that.

Mending

But, that being said, much that breaks in our lives can be mended. Probably much more than you allow yourself to believe. Mending may take time, effort and resources, but, much in our lives can be mended. These are things I'm talking about in the last few weeks. The things we can impact.

We're not taught to mend our broken pieces. We don't talk about the process or the benefits. Our culture hides broken things away. It's not modeled for us and frankly, it can be an awful lot of hard work. Really hard work. It's much, much easier to ignore the broken pieces of ourselves.

I'm thinking a lot this week about learning to mend those small chips and breaks. The little ones that happen but leave us functional. The kind we might notice in passing, might not thing about too much, we just adapt to automatically or that we put off fixing because something else is more interesting, easier or urgent.

I've been involved in several meetings about my son this week. One of the things that came up is that I'm concerned that he breezes through his homework. On the scale of problems, it doesn't seem huge, but someday. he's going to run up against something he can't figure out intuitively in a few minutes. At that point, he's not going to be able to deal with it because he has no study habits and no experience of working at figuring things out. If that happens in school, he'll crash and burn in a classroom. If it happens in life, he'll crash and burn in a job situation or a relationship. I'm not willing to take the chance that it happens in life. I'd prefer that he learn how to study, how to learn hard things and how to work with persistence now, so that when that day comes, he has the skills and experience necessary to learn something that's hard for him.

We do this with our kids all the time. We teach them skills at home in a safe environment so that when they grow up and get out where it matters, they're well equipped to handle life. Let's apply that idea to ourselves for a moment. If you mend the small chips in your life, when catastrophic breaks happen, you're much more likely to have the tools and experience necessary to cope with them. But, how do we mend the small chips?

How Do We Mend The Small Chips?

First, stop ignoring them. It's very easy to hide the small imperfections, those little cracks, small chips. Society says to hide them, so we have social and cultural pressure to stash them away where they're not seen so that we look perfect to the world.

We do it with our health, we ignore small warning signs like numb toes when getting off a road bike that I ignored for a year or more. When it started to be a numb leg and happen off the bike too, it took me 2 years to heal and still affects what shoes I can wear 15 years later. Had I dealt with that problem when it first appeared, it probably wouldn't have been nearly so severe. I ignored it because it didn't seem like a big deal, I was busy and I could compensate. We do it in relationships and in work performance.

Let's stop. Let's stop ignoring the small chips and cracks and create a habit of dealing with them as they arise.

Not only do we ignore them, though. We compensate for them. My son has issues with transitions. Getting him from one task to another can be really hard--even if he likes the thing I'm asking him to do. I realized this week that rather than force him to deal with that issue, I've learned ways to compensate and get around the problem. We all do this. Metaphorically, we walk around so long with a pebble in our shoe that it becomes the norm. We compensate by standing or moving a certain way to minimize discomfort. We get so used to doing that that we forget the pebble doesn't need to be there, we can choose to stop for a moment and remove it.

What would your life be like if you removed all the pebbles?

Let's stop that too. Let's stop compensating and making excuses for things that need to be fixed. Let's just fix them.

Start small. Learn strategies and gain tools to handle the small stuff. You'll gain confidence because you've done it before. Dealing with things instead of ignoring them becomes habitual and part of your approach to life.

Think about this concept in terms of a relationship. It can be very easy to ignore seemingly small irritations. These grow into resentments over time and lead to much bigger problems. But, imagine if you take the hard step of dealing with the small irritations as they come up. You work through them. It's still emotionally risky, but you get through it. I'm telling you, the risk is much smaller in a small chip than a large fracture. Learn on the small chips.

The next time, it's a little easier. You know you did it before. You develop a habit of dealing with those things as they arise. You gain experience, confidence and trust over time. When a big break happens, a large fracture in the relationship (and all relationships have hard times), you have the habits, tools and experience to tackle it.

On the other hand, if you've not dealt with the small things when they arise, when the big things happen not only do you have no experience, no tools, no history. you have the added problem of all those unresolved issues. Those small things, they don't magically resolve on their own. They just stack up in the back of the closet and come crashing down when the doors to another problem are opened.

Learning to deal with the small chips, whether they're health issues, relationship issues, character issues or in other areas of life will pay off big dividends in the long run. I know it's much easier not to. I know it might seem like you don't have time. I know it seems like a lot of work. I know you can get by without doing it. And I know that they don't seem that important.

But, the payoff is a big deal. You'll be surprisingly free-er in the short term. But, in the long term, your increased capacity to cope with the big breakages in life will be so very valuable when life crashes. It could be the difference between a hard time in your marriage and divorce.

It's never too late. Start now and start small. I'm not teaching my son how to make a four course meal. I'm teaching him how to make scrambled eggs. Someday, maybe he'll have the skills to make me a lovely, complicated dinner. But, unless he starts with the basics, that's impossible. We all know this. Let's just apply it to the small broken pieces of ourselves.

Episode Artwork

The art this week is a quilt. It didn't exactly start out that way, but that's where we arrived. A patchwork, hand-stitched piece of work that represents that mending you can do in small pieces. I've been following several folks on Instagram who are working on an everyday stitching project and it was enough to inspire me to start one of my own. It reminds me how much work can be done in small bits of time consistently spent. Pick up your mending and work on the small things.

The mended, stitched cloth is the important part of life, but the needle is there representing the daily work. I was going to make it large, like the bird from last week, but I realized that needles are small. They get lost easily. They're easy to drop and dangerous when we do. So, it's smaller on this piece. It blends in. It's not the easy thing to see...or do. But, it's the way a quilt is made. One piece of patchwork or piecing at a time. One stitch at a time.

Let's start stitching. Let's start dealing with the small stuff.

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