Bill Gross's take on "Don't sweat the small stuff. It's all small stuff."

"Remember just two things," an old friend once told me while I was struggling with a host of seemingly insurmountable problems. "One: Don't sweat the small stuff. Two: It's all small stuff." His advice produced an instant guffaw that soothed my short-term pain, but over the years it had become a source of serious personal reflection. There's a wallop packed into those two sentences that could keep philosophers or a slew of radio talk-show hosts busy for years. If it's all "small stuff" and life is but a dream, as the last line of the old song maintains, lots of gentle rowing is probably a great way to proceed down life's little brook. If, however, there's lots of small stuff and several big things, the pace quickens and a certain intensity is required. The trick, of course, is to determine what the big stuff might be and to recognize it when you you see it-not necessarily an easy task for anyone who seriously ponders the meaning and ultimate outcome of existence.

I have concluded, as you may have guessed, that there's both a lot of small stuff in this world that shouldn't raise a sweat and a few very big things that demand focus and constant attention. What's intriguing and somewhat frustrating, however, is how relative and mercurial even those big things can be as you move down the stream. Breaking up with your teenage girlfriend was certainly very big stuff at seventeen, but it hardly causes a ripple in the memory bank a decade later as you settle into marriage and family building. Failing to get a promotion or that new job was a crushing blow in your thirties, but twenty years later is written off as perhaps having been for the best. A wife's or husband's extramarital affair may have nearly brought a marriage to the brink of divorce, but failing health and the need for companionship as one approaches 60 relegate the incident to the category of "just one of those things." Over time, a lot of big stuff becomes smaller stuff, and in a way my friend's classic two liner makes sense. Maybe it is all small stuff!

But no, that cannot be right. Life has no meaning if it's just a series of historical events that quickly lose their significance. What's wrong with the above analysis is that those events should never have been considered big stuff in the first place. The big stuff, aside from life's inevitable tragedies, is really the delicate, almost imperceptible fabric of feelings, thoughts, and actions that form the total of one's life. It has less to do with event - what things happen to people - than it does with behavior - how we react to them. It's not about individual successes and failures, but how you play the game. Do you deal with people fairly, with kindness, with at least a modicum of selflessness, acknowledging a world outside your own existence? Do you come to peace with your maker and approach life's final harbor with hope for an infinite future? Or can you at least look back with some pride how you rowed your boat down this earthly stream that flows to a most uncertain shore? That's the big stuff. The rest, in retrospect, is really not worth your sweat.