I will let you in on one of my secrets of life. It’s not a big deal.

That’s it.

To understand (not believe or pray or pretend but to actually understand) that it’s not a big deal. Almost nothing is.

In life, you will come across several occasions that cause you deep anxiety and sorrow. It feels like the end of the world. But remember, it’s not a big deal.

How do I know it?

Because I have been through it.

Oftentimes in life, I have passed through difficult times. Things don’t go according to plan. There are many reasons to be sad- you catch a disease, you run into an accident, you miss a flight, you are treated rudely by an unknown, you have a fight with your spouse or friend, your favourite team loses the World Cup, you failed an exam, your proposal was rejected, you did not get a grant, whatever. Remember all the occasions you have felt sad before.

At that moment, it felt like the most important thing. The world came crashing down. It was unbearable torture.

But now?

Now in retrospect, all those things didn’t matter.

They weren’t big deals.

If only today’s me could go back and tell that little me of the past “don’t worry, kiddo. You feel pain now, but it’ll be alright. This ain’t a big deal”

Because in the grand scheme of things, almost nothing is a big deal.

Don’t take my word for it. Think of all the sad times that made you lose sleep in the past. Some of those, you don’t even remember. So, they were such small deals but they felt like big deals at that time.

Well, if a new life is born or someone dies, that is probably a big deal for a human life. But except that, in the grand scheme of things, nothing is a big deal.

And this goes both ways- even positive things aren’t a big deal, so no point in being cocky and arrogant when things go your way.

But specially when you are faced with a challenging situation, never forget that although it feels enormous to you right now, 5 years later, you’ll see that this is not at all a big deal.

In retrospect, everything will make sense, and every thing will feel like a small matter.

You are scared because you don’t know the future. But it’s not just you- nobody knows the future. And things will always work out, and nothing will turn out to be a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

In long enough time horizon, everything and everyone will disappear into oblivion.

When the X axis of Kaplan-Meier graph is stretched out, at the end, all survival curves will touch the X-axis.

It’s silly when two waves argue which one is a bigger wave.

Give me five more seconds and both of you waves will have disappeared into the ocean.

That’s it. That’s my secret. It’s not a big deal. Anytime something unpleasant happens, I know (not pretend and therein lies a world of a difference) that “it’s not a big deal”, and everything feels ok again.

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