Kristin Armstrong and the Little Way

Over at her Runner's World blog, Kristin Armstrong has an epiphany while cleaning her bunny cage:

Everything ends up as peed-on paper.

What I mean is, the news somehow ends up reeking and inconsequential, on the floor of a rabbit cage. The most notable people and events, their ultimate successes and most humiliating failures, the dregs of society and their crimes, the humanitarians and their magnanimous deeds, the celebrities and their drivel, and the local who's-who and the latest party they attended. In other words, everything that is supposedly important enough for us to take notice is, in the words of a Coldplay song, "all yellow."

So what, then, really matters, she wonders …

Could it be that the regular components of a day, the average offerings of a basic human actually have staying power? Could it be the fact that normal contributions to the building of a life or a family have greater archival value than anything that makes the news?

Ding-ding-ding! Kristin has struck on to a great truth all too often lost in our celebrity- and success-driven culture, that it’s the little things we collectively value the least that, in the end, usually matter the most. As St. Thérèse of Lisieux once put it, albeit a little less colorfully than Kristin:

“Love proves itself by deeds,

so how am I to show my love?

Great deeds are forbidden me.

The only way I can prove my love

is by scattering flowers,

and these flowers are

every little sacrifice,

every glance and word,

and the doing of the least actions for love.”