Mike's Place

By Michael L. Craner

February?!?!?

I can’t believe how quickly time is sliding by, I guess that means I’m having fun?

Anyway that is precisely what I wanted to write about this month. Actually last month, but as you may have noticed I have been absent for a few months. A combination of “writers block” and other important matters that demanded my attention have kept me away.

At Christmas my mom sent me one of those little things one puts on their desks that help you make it through those tough days. It wasn’t a cute little Farside calendar either, but a small framed picture of a rowboat at a dock on a small lake with a beautiful sunset in the background, and the captions “Don’t sweat the small stuff”. What kind of cryptic message is that? I mean most of my life, I have been raised and trained to “pay attention to detail”, “Mind your pennies and your dollars will take care of themselves”. What am I supposed to? Do I worry about the little things, because they make up the end result, or do I let the little things go, and focus on the bigger picture? At any rate, I figured it was an important message, maybe even a sign, so I decided to make it my “New Years Resolution”. Now all I have to do is figure out what it means.

So, for the past month and a half I have looked at the picture everyday and wondered how I can incorporate it into my life and make it work. I’ve thought and thought till I thought I might need psychotherapy to recover from the mania this thing has brought me. It was then that the message started to become clear. Here I am stressing out over a little picture and message that is simply there to remind me not to do what I am doing. Sweating a small thing. One of those “catch 22” kind of deals I guess. A chicken or egg kind of thing.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes several things happen around you that aren’t really related; yet we manage to assimilate them and discover some divine message out of several clues and events? Ideas for my column, observations of my children, and now this picture on my desk have all come to tell me that it is time to return to my innocence and re-discover the fun in life.

Remember when you were a child, how a day seemed like a several, a week lasted a month, a month lasted a year, and a year was almost forever? I have thought about this a lot too, and I think it is because as children, we were always learning, and living. We got excited over Macaroni and Cheese & wieners, or cartoons on TV in the evening. Sure, we could never wait for a weekend, just like now, looked forward to our birthdays and Christmas, thinking they may never come, but we still stopped to smell the roses, climb a tree, and act spontaneously.

So, this year I’m NOT going to worry about not “sweating the small stuff”. I am going to re-discover the joy of Macaroni and Cheese. I think it is starting to work already. Remember how you can use the macaroni like a tiny straw? Or how those slices of wieners look like little flying saucers? This year when I take the kids fishing, I think I will help them, rather than fish myself. Maybe we’ll even use REAL worms this year!

I’ll bet that with time, and a little forgotten imagination, I’ll get the mystery of flying time under control and the only little things I’ll be sweating is when I am trying to keep up with my kids as we scramble down the hill to the creek.