Jargogled Impressions.

The little ones make it look easy. 

The intrepid sloths, or the tall oaks, or the mighty caterpillars, or the febrile squirrels make it seem obvious. 

And the awakened amongst us, knowingly or unknowingly, turn it into a joke. 

It’s the little things. It’s always the little things. The things you should pay attention to.

People call it by many names with their evolved human concepts. It’s the present, this moment. Or, it’s the detail. Or, it’s the specific not the abstract. Or, it’s the micro not the macro. 

The things that are there, visible in its starkest detail and yet invisible in its camouflaged ordinariness. It’s the cliches, and the cringe aphorisms. It’s the WhatsApp forwards and the Insta reels. 

It’s ordinary. The pedestrian moments. The garbage moments. 

When we chase the lofty ones, we delude ourselves. We hark back to the geocentric days when we are forever chasing the big, shiny, meaningful moments. The sublimity isn’t in the scope of things. It’s in our perception of it. And perceptions are easily influenced aren’t they? 

The authors that are the most influential are the ones that pay close attention to detail. The everyday becomes a treasure trove of detail for them, detritus picked from a haystack, sharpened with eerie observations, and delivered with a quiet poise. The most pleasant experience reading them involves uncovering layers, or just paying close attention to the background scores, the props, the eye movements, the hand gestures. Something hidden from immediate observation but when once seen cannot be hidden. 

Just like a Nolan movie perhaps. Movies where tomes get written to dissect a scene. 

It’s the details that shine bright when notes are chiseled through with disdain and lack of attachment. Details, which when mixed with professional acumen, can serve blockbusters with the zaniest of concepts and ideas. Because, as Joseph Campbell would say, the myth persists. The ever present story stays the same. The mythologies stay relevant. But the details make them richer. The details surface the vast underbelly of existence that we seek to validate in our mortal lives. 

There’s drama in these little moments, if only we let it linger. There’s meaning in those glances, if only we knew when to pay attention. 

When we chase story worthy moments, what are we chasing exactly? The fleeting moments of rapture, of thrill and pleasure? Or, are we really chasing a novel perspective? A change perhaps in how we view things or situations? We go through so many moments of pure exhilaration in life. How many do we tend to go back to often? Not many if you are like me. Most of these moments are like the Instagram stories, only in this case the platform is our consciousness. So why chase them then? The thrill of the moment or YOLO? Maybe the hedonic sentiments aren’t as tiny, but I wonder if there’s something more. Behind those moments lie the angst, the exhaustion, the fear, the sacrifice. The more there is behind that which makes the perfect snapshot, the more the experience stays with us. An unfortunate side effect of this is that we tend to remember our troubles or when things went wrong more than when they did not. 

Why are our memories so goofy? Why can I remember the most mundane of interactions that happened decades ago and that has no apparent imprint on the paths I chose in life subsequently? Memories tend to favor the specific, but it seems to embolden the abstract. It seems to highlight the underdog moments more often than not. There’s a mystique in them that science may take awhile to uncover. 

The little things shape us in ways we hardly recognize in the moment. They slip into our consciousness quietly, nestling into the folds of our memory, influencing our perceptions and reactions before we even realize it.

The nostalgia for a childhood snack (the madeleine!), the familiar sound of the Bajaj chetak scooter, the way light filters through a window at a particular hour of the day—all seemingly insignificant, yet they etch themselves into our stories with more permanence than the grand events we think define us.

We’re drawn to scale, to magnitude, to things that shake the ground beneath our feet. But the true undercurrent of life is formed by the minor ripples, the whispers rather than the roars. We romanticize grand adventures, epiphanies that shatter old paradigms, and victories that mark turning points. But in reality, the change is often imperceptible, unfolding in the unnoticed, the forgettable, the everyday.

Think about love. It is rarely built on grand gestures alone. It’s in the remembered chai preparation, the way someone texts you to drive safely, the way they un-laugh at a joke they’ve heard a hundred times because they know it makes you happy. Love thrives in the tiny, unremarkable details, the ones so ordinary they might be mistaken for routine—until they are gone.

Think about grief. It sneaks up not necessarily in the obvious moments—the funeral, the anniversaries, the loss of milestones. It’s in the empty seat at the dinner table, the muscle memory of reaching for a number no longer in service, the unconscious habit of saving a seat for someone who will never arrive. The little things carry the weight of absence more powerfully than the larger voids we prepare ourselves for.

Art understands this deeply. The most powerful storytelling is often in the nuance—the unspoken words, the way hands hesitate before touching, the extra second someone lingers in a doorway. A single detail, an object placed just so in a frame, can convey an entire history, an entire longing, an entire heartbreak.

Perhaps, then, the art of life is to recognize these little things as they happen, not just in hindsight. To notice the warmth of a hand resting lightly on our back, the symmetry in the way shadows fall, the brief flicker of vulnerability in a stranger’s face. To let the ordinary moments be extraordinary simply because we choose to see them that way.

Because at the end of it all, when we look back, it won’t be the big, shining, cinematic moments we return to the most. It will be the small ones, the quiet ones. The ones that remind us we were here, we felt, we lived.