How Many Blippettes Add Up to a Blip?

Last week I lost my wallet. I decided to go on living, anyway. This was not even a blip, I declared. It was a mere blippette!

Since then, however, blippettes have proliferated in my life at an alarming rate.

I shipped a precious package, and its expensive and irreplaceable contents were lost in the mail; only the lid of the box was delivered, with a note from the U.S. Postal Service saying "WE CARE."

I mailed all my W-2 and 1099 tax forms to my math-whiz sister in Indiana, who does my taxes each year for me. The post office tracking information reports that they are now languishing somewhere in Illinois. There was no mention of whether or not the U.S. Postal Service cares.

This morning my granddaughter noticed a steady drip-drip-drip of water from the lamp fixture over the kitchen table. Lamps do not generally drip water. Alas, the new roof installed with a zillion-year guarantee just a few years ago is leaking water from roof to attic, and from attic to light fixture to kitchen table.

WAAAHHH!

This is too many blippettes for one person in one week! Especially for a person, I might note, who also has her share of what anyone would say are real problems, too.

So here is what I'm trying to remind myself today.

Each of these annoyances, numerous as they have become, is nonetheless still a blippette.

That said, blippettes do add up. However, when they add up, they are still only blips.

Ahh, but don't blips themselves add up to something bigger? After all, enough trivial expenditures add up to a huge credit card bill; enough small savings deposits add up to a comfortable retirement.The whole premise of this blog - and of my entire writing career - is that a mere hour a day spent writing can add up to dozens of published books over the span of a lifetime.

Little things add up to big things. That is an indisputable fact.

But . . . this is another indisputable fact: while it is not up to me how much time these blippettes end up taking, or how much money they end up costing, it IS up to me how blippy I allow them to be. I can still decide to sigh and shrug and then remember that other people on this earth have also had packages go astray in the mail. I am not the only human being ever to have a leaky roof. In fact, billions of people on this planet don't even have a roof to leak. I can decide how much psychic energy to give to bewailing even FOUR BLIPPETTES IN A SINGLE WEEK.

This week my cumulative tally of blippettes has definitely amounted to a blip. But even a blip is not the end of the world, or even a reliable omen of the approaching end of the world. It's just a reason to eat a few extra handfuls of jelly beans and not one, not two, but three Russell Stover cream eggs, now on sale in the holiday aisle at King Soopers.

I'm off to have the strawberry cream one now.