Yes! Sweat the Small Stuff

It’s ALL about the “small” stuff when it comes to living a healthy counterclockwise life. It’s about the accumulation of all that small stuff, the sum of the many little decisions we make every day that can result in keeping us vibrant, engaged and happy well into the upper reaches of our lifetimes.It’s true: We’re constantly bombarded by news of the newest miracle product, the best-ever exercise plan, the just discovered! powerful-beyond-belief! anti-aging supplement, the one (impossibly exotic) cure-all superfood, the quick fix we’ve all been waiting for, the big secret that will now be revealed. We want to believe. We are socialized and acculturated to believe in The Next Big Thing. Yay consumer capitalism! Yay take-a-pill western medicine!But health and wellness doesn’t work that way. Health and wellness is the result of specific choices. You reach for an apple instead of a bag of chips. You take a walk instead of sit in front of a screen. You stretch your calves when you wait on line at the grocery store. You go to bed a half hour earlier. Earth-shaking? No. Life-changing? You bet.I was reminded of this way of thinking when I read Deborah Szekely’s new post at wellnesswarrior.org. I’ve written about kick-ass nonagenarian Deborah before. Let me quote her again right now:Achieving overall fitness and well-being is built choice by choice, one "smidgen" at a time. So is disease and infirmity. In fact, the small choices—repeated often enough and over time—have the greatest impact. The cumulative effect of actions and non-actions shape the person we are today and the person we are in the process of becoming as we age.Later, she writes this:Aging is not something that kicks in suddenly when we turn 65; it is a progressive accumulation that builds over a lifetime of eating, breathing, exercising (or not), “stressing out,” burning the candle at both ends, and a myriad of other actions and choices.And Jeez, the woman should know. She’s 92. She glows. She hikes up mountains. She travels the country and the world promoting good food and good health. She is living life to the fullest – is able to live life to the fullest – because she has spent the last 70-plus years paying attention to the small stuff.For those of you who know me more broadly as a writer (and not just of these blog posts), I want to add that this same advice permeates my writing life. In the new edition to When Words Collide, a book about the art and craft of writing well that I first co-wrote many years ago, I say this:Keep in mind that good writing doesn’t just happen. Stories don’t “write themselves.” Skilled writers, talented writers, professional writers work hard at it. They struggle and strain. In fact, contrary to the clichéd admonition, they do sweat the small stuff. In fact, it’s all about the “small stuff.” Clear, powerful, evocative prose is the result of a series of small, conscious choices that transform the ideas inside writers’ heads into the stories we want to read…. Style is the culmination of many small things done well, the result of sheer hard work.The same, the very same, can be said about living a vibrant, healthy and engaged life. So today, right now, make one small good choice. (And send a comment about it to the site. I'd love to post a list.)