The Smallest Thing

I'm always astonished that the smallest things can have an importance far beyond the most elaborate, thoroughly thought-out, infinitely considered conditions.

The immediate instance before my eyes is that of a friend's visit in my kitchen here this morning. He has been in a serious despondency for a year or two due to several severe health problems in his family, loss of income, and the reconsideration of old misfortunes going back fifty years to his childhood. He was “down,” no doubt about it.

I was thinking as we were going back and forth, often quite passionately, across his reasons for feeling down, that there was nonetheless the possibility that he could nonetheless make a decision, a very small decision similar to the flipping of a small switch, that could change his unhappiness into happiness.

Dostoyevsky described a man who has been depressed for years who looks out a train window while at a platform in Zurich and sees a donkey braying. Just seeing that donkey braying brings back his good perspective.

I'm sure a lot has been said and written on the problem, even on Dostoyevsky's specific instance. The guy in the train undoubtedly had been thinking over his problem for years, consciously and subconsciously. But in the end, it seems to me that there is a decision, a seemingly infinitesimally small but necessary decision being made.

All I have to do is to remember the face of a beloved friend I once knew, or to think of a young boy I once knew who was like a son to me, or to think of the most amazingly good-hearted old lady I once knew, pure of heart, who truly and simply trusted in God. There are others, too. All I have to do to put an upside-down world aright is to remember just the very existence of even one of these people. Then the world makes sense to me and I see the miracle.

*      *      *