Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff by Wendy Schuman

Almost 30 years ago, a self-help book came out whose title sounded like a rebuke to

everything I believed. “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…and It’s All Small Stuff” by Richard

Carlson, was on various best-seller lists for two years.

I immediately bought this book (self-help books are an obsession of mine) because I’m someone who does sweat the small stuff, and the big stuff too. Dealing with anxiety has been a life-long issue for me.  I’ve never taken anti-anxiety pills (except on planes), but meditation, prayer, journaling, and grasping my husband’s hand in a panic seem to work. Most of these methods were recommended in the book—except for grabbing Ken’s hand.

My feeling has always been that if I don’t worry about it, things will go wrong. So I feel personally responsible for keeping planes aloft, maintaining my family’s health, making kids’ exams go well, and getting everyone home safely. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have much influence on elections.

In an interview Dr. Carlson explained, “We blow things out of proportion… We all spend far too much time fretting over trivia that is irrelevant in the long run and not enough time concentrating calmly on what’s going right, rather than what’s going wrong. It’s very exhausting and it takes the joy out of life.”

I was reminded of that philosophy recently when we stayed with our two small grandkids for a few days while our son and daughter-in-law were away. Our son had “won” a trip to a resort in Mexico by doing well in sales at his company. Happy news! They would have stress-free time to relax while we figured out meals, bedtimes, screen limits, lostlovies, and a dozen other child-rearing issues. “How did we ever do it?” I asked my husband more than once.  We ended up being a little more, um, lenient than their parents would have been.

But we really stopped “sweating the small stuff” when geopolitics reared its head. On our son’s second day in Mexico, the head of a drug cartel was killed by the Mexican government and retaliatory violence broke out around the country. The airport they’d arrived at was closed, and they were in lockdown at their hotel.

We can all think of worse places to be in lockdown than a full-service resort. But the hotel was running out of food, and the staff was locked down too and couldn’t be relieved.

Immediately our small-stuff worries shifted to big stuff—would our kids stay safe, would the airport open, and would they even be able to get to the airport 40 minutes away? Fortunately, the airport reopened in a couple of days and their bus was escorted there by an armed guard.  Our kids were reunited with their little ones, who survived despite their grandparents’ lenient care. Their parents had even watched us reading them stories at 10:30 pm on the nanny cam monitor in their bedroom. We hadn’t gotten awaywith anything! But that, to me, was the small stuff.

We were so grateful—and given the amount of big bad stuff happening in the world, I’m more determined than ever not to let the small stuff stand in the way of happiness.