“Any idiot can face a crisis, it is this
day-to-day living that wears us out.” (Anton Chekhov)
I think of this quote often, because it's so true. A child goes missing, a car veers off
the road and we hear,
“I
barely looked away and suddenly he was gone.”
“I
took my eyes off the road for just a second and the car was up a
pole.”
How often do we hear of terrible fights breaking out between people
who later say, “It was all over the silliest thing.” When the big
stuff hits, some mysterious reserve within us kicks in to handle it,
but the little things often make us the most emotional.
Case
in point: Recently I had a heated argument with a co-worker about
whether to type one space or two after a period. It's an argument
I've had with others before, and a casual glance at this entry will
tell you where I land on the subject. It's not as though it even
matters, really, but it makes me crazy when I see it done in what I
learned was the “old-fashioned way.”
I've
got lots of specific thoughts on the virtues and pitfalls of
punctuation, and will post them all in due time, but for today, I
guess I just want to say, “Watch out for the little things.”
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