Life is in the details

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things...

This is one of my favorite songs, not just for the movie, or the music, but for the lyrics themselves. Put alone, one really wouldn't pay too much attention to raindrops on roses - you'd probably want to run home and escape the rain. Or for that matter brown paper packages - you'd rather rip the package open to see what's inside. But the things mentioned in the song, are small, everyday things that are... for the lack of a better word... sweet!

So some say that the devil is in the detail, I say that life is in the details. Managers tell us to focus on the big picture all the time. So in life, we look for the big house, the big car, the big career, everything! But somewhere down the road, when you have a minute of reflection time, you don't think of that BMW in your garage or your palatial villa in the French Riviera. You think of that rainy day when you sat drenched with a few friends in an Irani restaurant with a cutting chaai. You think of the classes in school where you convinced the prof to give time off so you can play dumb charades. You think of that one night where you sat with friends playing truth and dare all the way to the morning! Yes, life resides in the details.

The number of places where tea has lodged itself into my slot of unique memories is huge! The 12.30 random tea with a friend after a gruelling assignment. A 2.30 tapri chaai after a crappy movie. The piping hot cuppa after stepping into the house from sub zero temperatures. The insane desire to drink tea in the backyard after a first sighting of snow! The 4 am tea with a friend complaining about a painful project client. The memories are plenty. But the core anchor is not just the tea, but the company.

So, life is in the smaller things in life. It is not always a big picture story. A walk in a nippy weather, with a random conversation sitting atop a rock, talking about books, life, friends, people, is a memory that will be cherished forever. A movie with a bunch of friends within the confines of a campus, on a surprisingly, relatively free evening is divine. At the end of the day, its these things that I would want to look back on and smile at, and think back about a life well lived.