REVELS IN THE DETAILS
For our cats, every night includes THE MOST IMPORTANT five minutes in the history of the universe.
They get dinner just before Travis and I go to bed, and — oh my god — it is a time of such unbelievable urgency and focus, concern and commitment. No matter that they’ve got kibble available round-the-clock. Dinnertime means wet food, and it is EVERYTHING.
The process has become overly ritualistic. This is largely Travis’s doing, because he’s developed an orderly system in which he divides up the pulverized and reeking offal into their three distinct bowls, then whisks in a portion of special puree, and finally sprinkles each with crumbled CBD treat. (Kitty dinner almost always is Trav’s job. When it falls to me, I don’t give nearly the same care to plating, but rather hold my breath as I just dump it all together and get it done as quickly as possible). The cats each have their own role in the choreography, too. Flo is the headliner — yowling and pacing, leaping from floor to island to counter, ensuring that nobody dawdles and that any unfortunate delays are resolved quickly and efficiently. Val supervises the proceeding from the stairs — like the manager of a factory floor observing from her glass booth above, adding an occasional grumble of impatience or encouragement. Danny guards the back door — he’s our security detail, sitting in a box we keep there for this very purpose — making sure that no neighborhood strays attempt to crash the event. The whole setup and preparation is ridiculously intense. And it’s almost always exactly the same. When the bowls finally are ready, they are delivered to specific locations in a particular order. The girls receive theirs on the stairs — separate stairs, with at least one empty stair in between, or else they’ll become too concerned with each other’s portion to enjoy their own. Danny has a private dining area, on the rug in front of the sink.
After all that, it’s over in less than a minute.
They don’t even eat much of it after it’s been served. They sniff it, lick a little, seem to forget immediately why it ever seemed important, then head up to bed. They may return later to nibble some overnight, but often not. In the anticipation of it, dinner seems like this huge, pivotal, critical, defining moment — all of feline history leading up to this very thing — but then, when it happens: meh.
I wonder if I do this, too. I mean, I’m pretty sure I do.
Anticipate, organize, freak-out, try to control every step in advance, despair when it looks like things might go sideways, devise contingency plans for every imaginable difficulty, finally bringing everything to its culmination… and then: meh.
I don’t know if it’s because I’m not right-sizing things —? Fixating on details and failing to see the big picture in which life goes on without my micromanagement. Or vice versa, caught up in the do-or-die, be-all-end-all, where everything means everything. Everything, that is, except the simple pleasures right before me, the tasks already accomplished, the grace already afforded.
I think a lot of us tend to overemphasize future concerns, making imagined outcomes more significant than they need to be, so we’re often too stressed-out and distracted to fully appreciate the good here and now. Which might suggest that this is all a matter of mindfulness and presence, or lack thereof.
Since last week’s talk, I’ve been thinking about Richard Carlson’s adage: “Don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuff.” I don’t really remember if I was agreeing with that statement or taking issue with it. Probably both, which is why it keeps gnawing at me.
Is it all small stuff, really? Or is it all everything?
Sometimes I try to manage overwhelm by breaking big undertakings down into bite-sized, manageable steps. Put them on a to-do list, make a spreadsheet, and schedule my way back to sanity. No sweat! The downside of this, though, is that life becomes a checklist. Every day, a series of tasks to be gotten through until I can finally drag myself to bed: “thank god that’s over.” Such a checklist doesn’t quite evoke much of the luster and meaning that I hope my life might have.
On the other end, living exclusively in the big picture — dharma and destiny, generational concerns, legacy and eternity. Well, it can be really hard to feel grounded in that… I mean, that can make it all seem so monumental that it’s hard to know where to even begin.
Where I arrived last week (and most weeks) was in a both/and. Everything is potentially everything. And, at the same time, this is just this. We can blow it up or shrink it down to any proportion. What matters is how we choose to be with it, who we choose to be in it, right now.
As I was mulling this over, I got the saying, “the devil’s in the details” stuck in my head.
It’s a nice turn of phrase, usually attributed to Nietzsche. It means: pay attention to the minutia. Big things — projects, events, works, lives, societies — are all constituted of their individual components. If those smaller parts aren’t taken care of, the entire enterprise becomes unsound. We might have the grandest vision, the noblest big-picture intentions, making beautifully sweeping generalizations. But if we haven’t attended to the details, they’re likely to sneak up and bite us in the butt.
Nietzsche swiped the phrase from the earlier saying, “God is in the details.” I don’t know if that was coined originally by architect Ludwig Miles van der Rohe, but he usually gets credit because apparently he said it a lot. It’s the flip side, essentially the same sentiment, but with a more positive spin. Meaning: it’s in the details that the rubber meets the road, where life meets Life. It is through taking care of the technicalities, trivialities, and small potatoes that anything and anyone, everything and everyone, achieves authenticity, meaning, and purpose.
I’m inclined to see it both ways. (If there’s one constant in the universe it is my ambivalence.)
Yeah, details can be devilish and undermining. They can call forth my obsessive and compulsive nature. They can turn life into a check-list where I lose sight of its majesty. They can make it seem like the whole house is falling apart when really I just need to change a lightbulb.
At the same time, those details are the stuff of which my days are made, of which our lives are made. They are God not just as an abstract, but as an actuality. Big picture issues can be very important — society and politics and philosophy and the environment… But if I’m so relentlessly upset about the thousand-year impact of microplastics that I can’t appreciate and enjoy this sweet moment, right now, then I’m missing out on the divine in my daily life.
So I’m trying to remind myself to revel in the details — godly and devilish, both. Details like: here I am in this body, with this sunlight streaming through my window, with this cup of delicious coffee. Here are my cats, whom I love, even though they are quite insane. Here’s my to-do list, chock full of things I’m looking forward to as well things I wish I didn’t have to deal with, and each item is an opportunity for me to show up, do my best, and shine. It’s a beautiful day, friends. And I am going to be happy in it.
I can’t wait to be with you this Sunday, August 25, 10:00am at q-Staff Theatre. With special music by Sasha Menendez and Brian Malone! XO, Drew
©2024 Drew Groves
