God Is in the Details
February 14th, 2010
Maybe you’ve heard the saying, “The devil’s in the details”? It probably means something like whatever details you overlook in whatever you’re doing will come back to bite you. That saying is actually a corruption of an earlier motto, attributed to Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880): “Le bon Dieu est dans le detail” (“God is in the details”). Evidently, I prefer the earlier form of the idiom. Although everyone’s life experience is replete with examples of the ways in which this saying proves true, the great temptation remains to focus our attention on the big items we see playing out on life’s stage all around us. These critical issues are the ones that grab our focus and demand our attention in our careers, our relationships, and our personal condition. These are the both ‘important’ and ‘urgent’ tasks that inhabit Stephen R. Covey’s “Quadrant One.” What you won’t find in “Quadrant One” are things like success, intimacy, peace, harmony, and, ultimately, happiness.
Do we really need to ask why a preoccupation with the big issues eventually leads to failure and unhappiness in careers, in relationships, and in regard to your personal health and well-being? When it comes to your health, what happens when you wait until things get really bad (a crisis) before looking for treatment? Don’t you then find yourself racing to beat the pathology to the finish line? The closer you allow issues to come to the tipping point (that point at which failure is unavoidable), the more important and urgent the need to engage in corrective action becomes, and the lesser your chances of meeting that challenge successfully. At the same time, the more your resources are dedicated to handling any crisis, the greater the chances will be for other issues to approach their tipping points.
Into every life, pain must come. It may come from any number of sources: from loss, from betrayal, even from growth. Regardless of where it originates, the general outlines of the experience are universal. Foremost, we feel what we recognize as emotional pain. Heartache settles on us like a heaviness that we can’t shrug off, that no amount of cheerful banter or amusing distractions can unseat. Our expressions remain blank, our eyes reflect a kind of lifeless dullness, in conversation, our voices lack sparkle. Although there are many similarities, pain is not the same as clinical depression. Unlike depression, emotional pain has a recognizable source. We can pinpoint why and where we are hurting.
I drive a red 1994 Jeep Wrangler that I bought brand new. It has sat outside in all kinds of weather for the past sixteen years. Last week, I noticed with some annoyance that one of the tires was losing air . . . again. Last time, it was the left front. Now, it’s the right front. I was tempted to blame my repair place, because I’ve been bringing it back there with the same complaint a number of times. This time, when I picked the car up, I asked, “Why do the tires keep losing air?” The receptionist told me, “Oh, the wheels are pretty corroded and we had to clean them up and apply some special sealant.” I recognized that it was my seemingly-benign neglect that had been the trouble all along. The rust and corrosion is gradually eating up not only the wheels, but the bumpers and some of the body as well. Is the fate of the whole vehicle in question?
Earlier today, a friend told me (and I don’t know for certain whether or not he’s correct) that the Greeks have a saying for when a young couple has their first wall-shaking shout-fest. The bemused neighbors comment, “They’re learning to love each other.” It’s the rare couple (none that I know of) who has never raised their voices at each other. I will say this, though: if a couple is ever going to do verbal battle, it’s going to be at midlife. Healthy couples never stop “learning to love each other.” For those that do stop, they eventually discover that they’ve grown apart, seem to have little left in common, and it’s the perfect time for one of them to drop the “love bomb” — you know the one: “I love you, but I’m not in love with you.”
Ever since people were able to distinguish the idea of ‘I’ from the idea of ‘my’, they’ve been asking the question, ‘why?’ In a hundred million different ways, people ask, “Why am I here?” For as long as I remember, that question (in its myriad of different forms) has sometimes boggled, sometimes driven, but always infused my conscious reflection. When I was just an adolescent, a therapist once commented to me that (in his words) I was “obsessed with the truth.” His appreciation of what was really going on was close to the mark (maybe as close as my adolescent powers of expression could take him): my true obsession has always been with meaning. I am one of those intellectually driven dudes who absorbs all the ‘why’ questions that people constantly throw at the universe and I remake them, refined and condensed, into one great challenge to All That Is: “What is the meaning of life?” Oddly, there’s nothing rhetorical about me. I actually expect an answer.
