Why We Sweat the Small Stuff

A mug sits on the counter. Your girlfriend bought it for you a year ago, and the coffee stains mark ten-ounces, fastidiously, so you can control your blood pressure. Opening the refrigerator door, you nudged the leftover piece of pound cake and the bag of organic carrots to the side to grab the soy vanilla creamer. After twisting off the cap, you drizzle a few drops of creamer into the mug. Then, you grab the pot of coffee that your father had made an hour ago before he left for work and pour the coffee up to the line.

The same mug sits on the counter. It sits next to a thirty-two-ounce pot of coffee. You grab the pot and tilt it over the mug. Coffee cascades and overfills the mug, spilling on to the counter, on to the floor. The mug refused to accept the pot of coffee. It could only hold eleven ounces.

Today at work, I saw this description of a morning gone wrong at work, (not literally, although that would have been funny). A person’s brain is like a coffee mug. It can only process so much, hold so much. Just as a mug cannot contain a pot, the mind cannot deal with a substantial problem. For example, a small problem developed at work this morning. My boss had four of us around one computer, trying to solve an irrelevant problem. It took an hour to solve scrupulously this issue, because every time we had solved it, someone pointed at another “I” to be dotted or another “T” to cross. Then the phone rang. I answered. Something important had come up, something that needed our attention. Indeed, it would be difficult and require efforts, but it needed to be finished. I told my boss. He sat there for a moment. “No,” he said, “We can take care of that later. Now back to…”

His mind was like the coffee mug, it could only process so much so fast. In that moment, I saw myself, sitting on Tumblr, organizing my profile, updating my photo, changing the design, editing the profile description, changing the design again, filling my queue, changing the design back to what it was before I started, all while the FAFSA form sits incomplete online or while that novel still has not been written or while that seven-page research paper remains a thought or while the credit bill grows in length or while I still have not cried since my cousin died two years ago or while I ignore that I graduate in two years and need a better action plan than “graduate school.”

Like a coffee mug, we can only hold so much until we swallow what is inside, which is why we love to tackle small, inconsequential things – they are easy and the big stuff is not. This reminds me of the philosophy in which all the aspects of life that demand our attention are like screaming monkeys in a cage, and your brain can only handle so many monkeys. One must let go of a few quieter, less important monkeys so that he or she can feed the massive monkeys that demand his or her attention.

I hope we can all free our minds from a few of our insignificant monkeys in order to quiet the monkeys that will determine how the present moves forward into a better future.