The Little Things

“Rain, rain go away…and if you don’t we’ll jetset out of this town and won’t return until your skies are sunny.” That’s how the song goes, right? Regardless, rain had dowsed Sydney for too many days straight, so our Melbourne trip arrived at just the right time.

As our plane climbed to altitude through Sydney’s stormy clouds and zipped onward toward Melbourne’s clear sky, I started to re-read one of my favorite books, Tuesdays With Morrie. I hadn’t read it since high school and figured that as graduation nears, now was a great time to revisit what should be life’s textbook. I finished the book later that night (all 192 tiny pages), tears on my cheeks and inspiration in my heart. Encouraging its readers to live meaningfully by connecting with people and by enjoying the little things in life, the book was even better the second time, or maybe its message just resonated more with my twenty-one-year-old self (yikes!) than my sixteen-year-old self. I appreciated its reminders and vowed to start paying more attention to The Little Things in my fortunate life. Like these:

It’s the little things in life like when your best friend surprises you on your birthday with the necklace that you fell in love with at the market, teeter-tottered about buying and then finally decided against thanks to her comment that you should “wait. Think it over,” which she only said so she could sneak back to the tent when you were busy browsing through the clothes.

It’s the little things like cruising on the Great Ocean Road with Jack Johnson singing the trip’s soundtrack. It’s the breathtaking turquoise color of the ocean—the same one that brushes your shores at home, only it can’t be because you’ve never seen an ocean so beautiful. It’s the massiveness of the rock formations that have stood along that coast longer than humans have existed. It’s looking out over the cliff and realizing that the next land mass is Antarctica. Ok the Great Ocean Road might be a bit more than a little thing, but it’s the little things like when your tour guide is cute, walks barefoot all day and talks to you about your mutual love of maps all with an Australian accent.

It’s the little things like the bar you stumble across in a seemingly disgusting alleyway with your six friends, where they play Spanish reggae music and you dance and talk all night with Aussies who teach you that the city’s name is pronounced Mel-bin, not Mel-born.

It’s the little things like realizing the world is small when you are walking around a quaint, foreign city and you start to feel worlds away from your sisters and you get a little pang of sadness in your stomach. Then you stumble into a trendy clothing store, and on the first rack you pick through you find stuffed between hangers of board-shorts a sweatshirt with your hometown’s name printed across the front. And it’s the only one. And so you laugh in astonishment and the sales guy inquires why you are staring so hard at a piece of his merchandise. You try to explain through the beaming smile spread across your face that this small town in California is your hometown, et cetera, but you can’t explain that this sweatshirt has really just sent you a message saying something more along the lines of “it’s a small world. You’re never that far away.”

It’s the little things like DJ’s that make Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” into a techno remix for you to dance to on another Thursday night at Sidebar. It’s your aunt who sends you two cards on February 14th—one for Valentine’s Day and one for your birthday. And it’s the little things like waking up to clear skies back in Sydney. Thanks for the reminder Morrie.

Australia