Trivial is a “T” Word

Trivial is a word I’ve come to appreciate, especially when associated with words like; trouble, problem, difficulty, concern, nuisance, predicament, setback, worry, pain, annoyance, hurt, frustration, aggravation, upset, irritation, disappointment, disturbance, malady, disease, sickness, injury and regret. When you put trivial in front of any of those words it immediately lightens the load by a huge factor; that is if trivial is truly the proper adjective.

Sometimes when our days deliver interruptions or distractions by masses of trivial matters, while we are in pursuit of what we consider greater goals, we become agitated to no end. Our impatience grows. Our tempers flare up. But it is precisely on those days we should be truly thankful for the trivial that has crowded out the major. After all, which had you rather have, several trivial, easily overcome setbacks, or one major difficult setback? Call me lazy but when it comes to troubles, I’ll take trivial over major any day.

Yesterday was one of those days of trivial bothers. At the end of the day though, with all things considered, life was good. There have certainly been worse days. I’m not giving a long narration of the trivial troubles of the day to bore you with, but here’s the short list:

My Palm Pilot slipped off my belt and fell into the toilet.
Rushed out forgetting to brush my teeth, after having garlic sauce on my pizza the night before.
Stepped in a big pile of dog pooh on the lawn, didn’t notice until it was all over my shoes and pants legs.
Repeatedly turned over my coffee mug in the truck until it all was wasted but three sips.
Miss N and I waited and waited and tolerated while the phone company piddled with getting her line hooked up so she could gain net access from home. In the end they didn’t finish the job.
I misplaced the tiny tubing adaptor/fitting for the fish pond water pump I was installing at work, which is a long story and I was in a hurry to get back to Miss N’s cause the weirdo phone guy was coming back, and the fish needed to be put back in filtering circulating water – near panic.
One of the buckets I was using transferring fish and plants to the pond had a leak in the side and… just say it was another mess to clean up.
Then there was dinner, which I don’t even want to go into.
There was a phone call from my mother that was rather cryptic.
Another shall we say social occasion with just plain obviously bad timing or something.
And finally I kept Miss N up on the computer way past either of our normal bed times.

In between all that, hopefully nothing else that I didn’t notice went very badly wrong. I did eventually get my teeth brushed, cleaned up some of the material messes, found lost objects, and most things were working by the end of the day. I’ve probably left a few people wondering about my sanity, but that’s not such a new thing. The point is, most of this stuff is trivial when taken in perspective of the big picture of life, and all of the really horrible things we hope and try to avoid.

When I went to sleep last night, everyone as far as I knew was safe, most of the trivial problems encountered during the day were overcome, and as a friend used to say, “Hey, at least nobody was killed.” I had hoped to make today a little better of a day, but so far I’ve hit the stumbling block of “what do you do when nothing goes particularly wrong?” I figure its just a matter of making plans and then trying to act on them. As it is, I forgot to make plans for today. Well not completely, just not many.

Posted by Dread who prefers trivial troubles to no plans at all.