“Remember to look at the big picture.”

As a junior in high school, knee deep in the college process, this mantra is something I’ve been told countless times. Parents, teachers, and college counselors seem to almost chant it like a prayer. They tell us that if you tightly grasp on to that macroscopic perspective, it will act as armor for all the stress and anxiety that will be inevitably floating your way.

One of the biggest dividing factors in our country today (for once, it’s not political) is our opinion on detail. We love to contradict ourselves. On one hand, we tell ourselves to not “sweat the small stuff.” On the other, we say to “enjoy the little things in life.” I could write a small novel on why you should “enjoy every sandwich,” but I was never a big fan of eye rolling clichés, and my New Year’s resolution is to cut back on carbs.

However, as I sat in the corner of an Amazon Books coffee shop, with my eyes intently focused on the espresso machine just a mere four feet away, I learned the importance of detail. Whether you don’t like to get caught up in the small stuff, or you enjoy blissfully basking in it, one thing is for sure: you should acknowledge the little, often overlooked details that decorate your daily routine. Although it might be easy for the chalk dust or the dog eared crinkle to slip through the cracks of your daily lenses, the little things are worth paying attention to.

As I sipped my black coffee, frustratedly trying to fill out the lengthy and extremely thorough junior questionnaire, I got distracted. A middle aged, rather tired looking woman sat down and opened her laptop on the nearest by table.

It wasn’t she herself that was distracting. At 8:30 in the morning, the coffeeshop was already buzzing with commuters grabbing a latte or early risers strolling through the adjacent book store. However, the woman was with her daughter, a young infant of maybe three years that was sleeping in a stroller. The woman turned her daughter directly away from the warm Saturday sunlight that had started to creep in, which meant the young girl, pacifier in mouth, was directly facing me.

My first instinct was to direct my attention back to my work. 74 unanswered questions haunted my computer screen. As I turned my gaze away from the girl, the littlest something caught my eye. But whatever it was, it flitted away before I could even recognize what grabbed my attention. After a couple of seconds of investigating, I saw it: two milky white slits.

She was sleeping with half of her eyes open.

The girl seemed to lay there in her stroller, suspended between the two worlds of intense focus and blissful surrender. I wondered what that state was like.

It seems as though people go through life as Velma without her glasses. They see the big things. The things that are most important in what they are doing at a given instant. If you are reading in a coffeeshop, you see your book and your latte clearly, but all the other less pressing matters and objects aren’t viewed with the same intense lens.

They turn out fuzzy.

I’ve found it’s the details that give your life that extra color, the vibrancy that it deserves. I’m not saying that you getting to drink your coffee next to a girl who’s sleeping with her eyes half open is “vibrant,” but there’s so much value that lays in the details that often goes unnoticed.

By the time this is printed, my motivation for a carb cleanse will surely have exhausted itself, but hopefully my attention to the little things will not have. Hopefully I will reread this and I’ll have the pleasure to notice the tiniest smudge of printer ink that decorates the title of my article. Maybe you’ll see it too.

If you can’t, squint your eyes until their two milky white slits, and just look closer.