To The Little Things

It was during an extremely chilling December, and no matter how many layers I wrapped around myself, the cold always managed to find its way to my bones. It was my first time in New York and my first time staying in another country, without family. I was renting out an apartment in a dingy section of lower Manhattan, or rather; my parents were renting it, and I was occupying it. Everything was the same color in that neighborhood; it was the kind of dirty gray that gets swept up into the air of long forgotten basements and warehouses. In addition to the lack of color, there were absolutely no stairs to get to my apartment; I was as far down as you could get without going underground.

The bed came out of the wall and fitted itself snugly between the stove and the door to the bathroom. Despite the size and location, I was quite content, in fact, I somewhat enjoyed the dinky nature of it. When I was younger my brother, and I used to zip each other into suitcases. We would drag the suitcases up and down the stairs, and all around the living room, laughing hysterically. That was until we grew too big to fit in the suitcases… This apartment, I found to be a suitable substitute.

Regardless of that, a week passed and the temperature only got worse. I wrapped a scarf around my neck and lit the stove, tripping over my shoes on the way to fill the kettle. I glared down at them accusingly, as if anyone but me could have put them there; my eyes wandered towards the window after kicking them across the room, which was when I saw him for the first time.

The outside world that day, and every day since I arrived was a large white canvas of ground and sky. Through the window, set against the bright sun and the glistening snow, was the outline...

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.... Only love and compassion will light your path to greatness” I later found out that was almost a direct quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a well-known German author… Whatever… Origins aside, it is slightly cliché, yet still holds a great amount of truth; and shaped who I am today. In fact, to my surprise, it wasn’t my first trip to New York, or my first taste of real independence that changed me; it was instead, the soft eyes of an old man and the wise words of my dad (and maybe Dietrich Bonhoeffer) that truly had an impact. For the most part, we tend to skip the little things in life, and charge straight for the big ones; which, ironically, causes us to lose a great deal more. In the words of Harriet Beecher “To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization”