I do believe that your life partner is one of them, and I don’t know that I fully understood that before, but certainly look at it now and realize how right that was.

It’s all about keeping things in perspective and really understanding what matters.

Some people are also right, spouses change. My husband and I met years before he took his first pre-med biology class. You can imagine how much each of us has grown since then! But I don’t think change necessarily means growing apart. One thing I know about life is that it’s always spontaneous: job loss, disappointment, illness, and a host of other changes. In the midst of chaos, we can find strength in the love that we’ve deliberately chosen, and that’s our north star.

I’ve heard it said before that “When you are weak at work, you can walk out in strength if things are good at home. When you are weak at home, you neevrr walk in strength.”

Having your priorities straight and getting the big things right is of the utmost importance.

Thanks for driving that point home!

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. It’s worth pointing out that the big things are ultimately just an infinite number of little things. It’s like a tree, where the big things are the trunk and main branches.

I agree with your points about movement, and I think limiting transportation time is actually one of the big things. Stacking functions and living close to the things you do on a daily basis is a huge lifestyle improvement. It opens up so much time to do other things. Sometimes the problem is knowing where you will be going in 1, 5, 10 years.

A marriage that ends in divorce is not necessarily a failure. People change and relationships end. But many of the marriages I see that fail had a low pre-test probability of success based on discordant values, personality conflicts or other huge red flags.

I completely agree with you on children. We have less control that we think. In my mind the big decision is whether to have them or not.

We do have a lot of control over who we let into our lives though. Who we spend time with, which relationships we let go – those are the big things and we should spend time trying to get them right.

We also have a lot of control over where we live, where we work, etc. We all make mistakes – I didn’t get all the big things right at every point in my life, but I got enough of them right when it mattered.

Hahaha! The guitar purchase was a little thing, but it sure felt like a big decision at the time. I’m playing the heck out of it though!

Moving home to Norway after a couple years in London was such a big move in terms of our happiness. It was a great and exciting city in a lot of ways, but it was ruining our health and making us depressed. Back “home” with wildnerness on our doorstep is where we want to be.

We should probably sit ourselves down and write a proper list of the things that are really important to us as well. Thanks for the prompt!

It’s funny, while we didn’t frame it this way, my husband and I made our move from sourthern California to Michigan due to many “big things” that ultimately have made our life a lot better, despite some tradeoffs. Sure, it is a lower cost of living area and all, but our big motives were proximity to family, ability to own a house with land near our town, the area’s general “outdoorsy” focus, and the seasons. And many things have revealed themselves this past year that have become big things to us… the vibrant community and the town. We now absolutely love our town and want to become more engrained each day 🙂

I’ve recently been enjoying the work of Katy Bowman who is a very fascinating biomechanist that focuses on movement-based lifestyles. In her book Movement Matters she talks a lot about the idea that our lack of movement not only causes our bodies to change in negative and often unanticipated ways (obesity being just one of many obvious issues), but she also does a great job connecting our inherent need to get outside and move more of our bodies (not simply move our bodies more). And it isn’t just that our reliance on modern conveniences is simply bad for our health. When we outsource our movement we are also creating a lot of negative social and environmental impacts that are perpetuating a lot of inequalities.

One of the best ways to meet more of our needs at the same time is to stack functions rather than trying to balance a bunch of stand-alone activities. This also helps with the busyness issue if we replace things like driving to go to the gym with urban adventures with our families from our house that include natural movement, time outdoors, opportunities to learn new things and interact with other people, etc.

This largely why I view some of what other people may consider to be “little” things to be some of the fundamental things to get right. It’s only when we are living, moving through, and experiencing our communities at slower speed (that are only possible when we exist outside of our vehicles) that we can do the “impossible” of reducing traffic, making our communities safer, etc.

Thanks for the thought provoking post!