The small, almost invisible, really important things

I recently wrote about the most important thing I own: my glasses, and that has gotten me thinking about all the small, almost invisible, really important things in our lives that we don’t notice until they’re gone or not working properly.

One example is if you’re the type of person who consistently purchases the same roll of toilet paper, you’ll immediately notice if it’s not the same one. Or when you go to start your car and it takes just a half-second longer. That’s when you know something’s amiss; you might need to get your car’s battery checked. You’ve never measured the amount of time it takes for your car to start, and yet, over time, you’ve gotten used to the usual feel and moment of starting your car. So when something feels different, you just know.

Every single time I go on vacation. I immediately regret not bringing my pillow the moment I lay down on the bed. The first thing I tell my wife when we lay down in bed is I can’t believe we forgot her pillows.

Those are just a few examples of the small, almost invisible, really important things.

I think it goes to show that we are creatures of habits, and we’re able to develop this sense of how things should be. Even if we can’t explain why somethings wrong or feels off when it is and if we tried to sit down to write down all of these almost invisible things, I bet you’ll have a hard time coming up with the most important ones because those are the ones that we don’t even think about until they’re missing because they’re so important to us that they’re like second nature and so we can’t even imagine life without them. They become an extension of our body’s autonomous system. We don’t need to think about breathing our body just does it. We don’t need to think about her heartbeat because our body just does it.

Just like we don’t need to think about those small, almost invisible important things. That is, until something stops working or doesn’t feel right.