I remember as a child seeing my dad turning the steering wheel back and fort--a little bit left, a little bit right, a little bit left, a little bit right--as he drove our old Ford station wagon, yet it seemed we were going straight. I asked him why he was turning the steering wheel back and forth when we weren't turning, and he told me it was to get where he wanted to go.
When I would pretend to drive as a child, I would swing the imaginary steering wheel back and forth in a way that would have been like steering through a slalom course in a real vehicle. I thought for some reason you had to steer back and forth to go straight.
When I began to drive, I understood the necessity to steer back and forth as you drive straight. Little things act on the car to begin to move it out of the lane, and you have to counter-steer to keep it in the lane--to, as my dad said, get where you want to go. Even a rock, a joint in the pavement, or a breeze can alter your course. When a large truck is bucking a wind and deflecting that wind to both sides, it can almost blow me off the road in my light car, as I try to pass it.
I have read many times, in many places, that large airliners are flying off-course almost all the time. A 747 captain said that if you took off from the equator to circumnavigate the globe, intending to follow the equator, but were one degree off, by the time you got back around the world, you would be 500 miles off-course. But before a little thing can turn into a big thing, the pilot or the auto-pilot makes a little adjustment to bring the airplane back closer to on-course.
Little things:
Getting up 15 minutes earlier to better prepare for the day
Going to bed 15 minutes earlier to make it easier to get up 15 minutes earlier
Reading something worthwhile 15 minutes a day
Eating 200 calories fewer, or eating 15 grams of fat fewer each day
Saving $50.00 from each paycheck for a "who-knows-what"
Smiling at two strangers every day
Telling your spouse you love him or her every day
There are lots of little things that can happen to us, and we can happen to lots of little things. The thing about little things is that if we keep doing them every day, they will have a much larger effect on our lives. If we let the little things happen to us and don't do much about them, they can develop into large things in our lives, also.
Big things don't happen very often in life, and when they do, they have about a 50% chance of being good and desirable and a 50% chance of being bad and undesirable. Big, sudden things that happen in our lives are getting married, moving to a different state, changing careers, losing a job, a death in the family, a major health crisis, and so forth. Most lives don't average a big thing every year. In fact most lives probably average a big thing every ten or twenty years or so. That's why we don't often work directly on the big things that might happen. We work on the little things to try to control the big things when they do come into our lives. Working on the little things will keep most of the negative big things out of our lives. When a big negative things crashes into our lives, the time for preparation is past. Adopting little things to keep us on course can produce big positive things in our lives that are much harder to move off-course by the little things. We can get to where we don't have to worry nearly as much about either little things or big things after years of practicing positive little things.
Trying to move a full-grown tree is a huge and expensive undertaking and is seldom done. In doing so, many of the roots are cut off and the tree will almost certainly die when planted in its new place. But a tree seed is a small thing, and planting that seed will produce a desirable big thing in the future. It is just as almost-impossible to transplant a big, positive thing into our lives that will be almost immovable by the little negative things. We have to plant seeds now that will produce desirable things in the near-term and long-term future.
Please consider:
1. What little things are happening in your life to get you off-course?
2. What little things are you implementing in your life to try to keep you on-course?
3 What little things should you be doing right now to produce large, good, and almost immovable things for the future?
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