Minutes Live Long Lives

In Where Angels Fear to Tread, E.M. Forster wrote, "Every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important today and when you say of a thing that 'nothing hangs on it' it sounds like blasphemy. There's never any knowing which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things on it forever." I'm more convinced every day that tiny signs merit acute attention. For instance, a confused young man in Omaha. The deaths in Omaha are tragic because sadness is too hard for us to possibly share if we aren't involved. It distresses me that the killings began as a seed of individual sadness in a boy acknowledged, in general, as little more than a trifle. Depression is an overly shrugged-off, overtly stigmatized hybrid of action and idleness, and this is an instance which proves that when we ignore the small things, they become immeasurable in their repercussions.

The family friend, with whom the shooter was staying, says he was in the fetal position and chewing his fingernails when he first moved in with them. These are images I will hang onto forever. She added that after he got a haircut, he felt better.

How heartbreaking. How forgetful we are of the small things that mean so much, how careless we are in our daily minutiae. And how minutely fragile.