Life is a great bundle of little things

 “Life is a great bundle of little things.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. 

The phrase comes from The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, published in 1860. Holmes does not limit himself to stating that life is made up of small things: he introduces a precise and somewhat domestic image—a bundle, a sheaf, a handful of elements gathered together with no apparent hierarchy. Haz is a possible and quite elegant translation in Spanish, but in everyday Spanish, it could be translated as “La vida es un gran conjunto de pequeñas cosas.” The passage, moreover, contains a subtle ironic interplay. The narrator says, “Life is a great bundle of little things,” and one of the interlocutors reverses the formula: “Life is a great bundle of great things.” The wit lies right there, in that opposition between the great things we imagine constitute a life and the small ones that actually compose it.

It is worth remembering, in passing, that this refers to Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the American physician and writer, and not his son, the famous jurist.

There is something almost anti-spectacular about the sentence. When we talk about a life, we usually do so retrospectively. We select events and turn them into milestones: a birth, a death, a marriage, a trip, a war, a published book, an illness, a move. Biography needs to select. Life does not. Daily life does not unfold through neatly demarcated events. It unfolds while we wait for the bus, make a purchase, walk a few blocks, talk to someone, read a few pages, cook, clean, get bored, remember something, forget something else, look out the window, or return to a street we already know. Most of an existence does not seem to be made of events. It is made of intervals. And perhaps therein lies the strength of Holmes's phrase: a life is not the sum of its great moments, but the enormous collection of small experiences that we almost never consider worthy of being recorded.

A possible connection to skepticism appears here, though there is no need to turn Holmes into a philosopher. Skepticism, in a broad sense, introduces a distrust toward overly certain claims—not only toward grand theories, but also toward our own interpretations. And one of the most persistent is imagining that we know which events are truly important. We say, “This changed my life,” “That was the turning point,” “From then on, everything was different.” But how do we know that was the case? It is possible that we are retrospectively constructing a continuity that, at the moment of living it, did not exist. The skeptic can introduce a small discomfort: perhaps we exaggerate the importance of extraordinary events because they are easier to remember, to narrate, and to turn into explanations. A ten-minute conversation can have consequences for twenty years. A seemingly insignificant decision can alter an entire trajectory. A person encountered by chance on a street can end up being fundamental. A book read almost by accident can alter a way of thinking. And, conversely, that which at a given moment seemed monumental may later disappear without leaving almost any trace. Life, seen from this perspective, has something unpredictable and un-narrative about it. It does not behave like a well-constructed novel.

A particularly fertile connection is found in Montaigne. He turned a vast number of seemingly secondary matters into subject matter for thought. He did not need to wait for extraordinary historical events to write about human existence. He could dwell on a custom, a meal, an illness, a conversation, an anecdote, a memory, a physical trait, an observation about animals, or an everyday experience. This alters the traditional hierarchy of topics. The everyday ceases to be merely what occurs between important events and becomes a subject of knowledge. Montaigne seems to say that if we want to know what a man is, we do not need to observe him only when he accomplishes something exceptional. We must also observe him when he is sitting, when he eats, when he sleeps, when he is afraid, when he changes his mind, when he contradicts himself, when he gets bored. Ordinary existence ceases to be the background of life. It is life.

At this point, Ortega y Gasset enters the picture. The proximity to Holmes should not be framed as if both defended the exact same theory. They do not. But there is a particularly interesting connection surrounding the word “circumstance.” Ortega wrote that famous formula: “I am I and my circumstance, and if I do not save it, I do not save myself.” Circumstance is not simply the stage on which a person exists. It forms part of what that person is. Here, Holmes's phrase can acquire a different dimension. Small things are not merely small external events. They are also the concrete circumstances through which a life is realized: a specific house, a specific street, specific people, specific objects, specific habits, specific schedules, specific places, specific memories. Abstract life does not exist. This life exists. This person. This body. This room. This street. This conversation. This day. In that sense, Holmes's bundle can be read, without pushing the comparison too far, as a collection of circumstances that end up forming what we retrospectively call a life.

Culture usually rewards the extraordinary. Biographies are written around major events. The news selects the exceptional. Social networks favor what can be displayed. Even when we tell the story of our own lives, we tend to select what seems worthy of being told. But a paradox exists: the exceptional occupies very little time. A person can spend twenty years preparing for an event that lasts a few hours. They can take ten years to write a book that will later be read in a few days. They can train for months for a competition that lasts minutes. They can work for decades to reach a retirement that occupies a brief fragment of their existence. The event is visible. The process is quiet. And yet, the process occupies almost all of life. Holmes's phrase forces us to invert our perspective. The small ceases to be that which happens between important things. The small is that which sustains the important things.

A similar formulation is attributed to Charles Dickens: “Little things make the sum of life.” The idea is practically complementary. If Holmes imagines life as a great bundle of little things, Dickens observes that those things end up forming the total sum of an existence. But it is worth pausing here. A sum does not need to be composed of extraordinary elements. It can be formed by thousands of insignificant operations. One day does not seem important. Nor does the next. Nor the next. But thousands of days end up constituting a life. The same happens with habits, conversations, walks, readings, encounters, and even small mistakes. Individual insignificance does not prevent cumulative importance.

Another widespread formulation belongs to Frank A. Clark: “Everyone is trying to accomplish something big, not realizing that life is made up of little things.” Here the opposition becomes clearer: doing something big versus living. And perhaps the two are not equivalent. A person can accomplish something extraordinary and yet spend most of their existence doing completely ordinary things. The writer who publishes a great novel spends much more time editing sentences, walking, eating, sleeping, and running errands than writing the sentence for which they will be remembered. The scientist who makes a discovery spends years conducting experiments that lead nowhere. The politician who stars in a historical event also goes through thousands of absolutely banal moments. History preserves the event. Life preserves the rest.

Here, another older tradition can emerge: Seneca. In De brevitate vitae, he insists that the problem is not simply that life is short, but that we waste a huge part of it. But there is an interesting difference. For Seneca, everyday time can be an object of moral management. For Holmes, small things can simply be what existence is made of. A contemporary reading could unite both perspectives: if life is made of small things, then our relationship with them matters enormously. Not because every small thing has to turn into a monumental experience, but precisely because we cannot escape them. We do not only live the events we will remember. We also live all those we will forget.

Another possible literary connection appears with Borges. He had an acute awareness of the relationship between memory, identity, and time. In many of his texts, the suspicion arises that what we believe ourselves to be depends on an arbitrary selection of memories. A life told retrospectively is always a construction. We choose certain events and discard others. But what we discard was not necessarily lived any less. This difference between living and being able to tell what was lived is fundamental. A biography needs a plot. Existence does not. Perhaps that is why a real life always overflows any narrative we construct about it.

There is even an almost political dimension to this vindication of the small. A society obsessed with productivity, success, visibility, and exceptionality tends to value what can be measured or displayed: the result, the promotion, the award, the record, the quantity, the influence, the recognition. But there is a vast area of existence that produces nothing spectacular and yet constitutes virtually all of our experience. Walking without a purpose. Reading a book without turning it into content. Having a conversation without publishing it. Looking at a building facade. Walking down a street once again. Keeping an object because it reminds us of something. Taking a photograph that no one will see. Thinking for hours about something that will never turn into a conclusion. Even getting bored. All those activities seem insignificant from a productivist perspective. But from Holmes's perspective, they constitute precisely the material of which a life is made.

There is also a paradox of memory here. We especially remember that which breaks continuity: the accident, the trip, the death, the celebration, the failure, the discovery, the unexpected encounter. Precisely because those events break the monotony, they are easier to remember. The everyday, on the other hand, vanishes. And perhaps that is why we tend to overestimate the extraordinary. Not necessarily because it was more important, but because it is more memorable. A life reconstructed solely from memory would then be a distorted life: a kind of photograph composed only of exceptions. Holmes introduces a simple correction: let us not confuse the memorable with the important.

We can take the sentence even further. What would be a “little thing”? It can be an action, an object, a thought, a conversation, a habit, a place, a person, a smell, a walk, a read page, a wait, a gesture, a memory, even a mistake. There is no objective unit of life. What is insignificant to one person can be decisive for another. An old photograph may be worth nothing economically and be virtually irreplaceable to the person who keeps it. An ordinary street can be just any street to millions of people and contain the entire childhood of just one. A mediocre book can become a fundamental book simply because it was read at the right time. The importance is not necessarily in the thing itself. It is also in the relationship we establish with it. And that makes defining what constitutes a life even harder.

Here it is worth introducing a fourth connection, particularly attuned to the kind of reflection we have been engaging in: Georges Perec. His literary project of observing the infra-ordinary—that which happens every day and precisely for that reason we stop looking at—functions almost as a perfect literary continuation of Holmes. Perec allows us to take the sentence from philosophy into a kind of archaeology of the everyday: looking at a square, a street, a table, an object, a repeated path, and asking ourselves what is there that we normally do not see. Skepticism then functions not as a doctrine, but as an attitude of distrust toward our own hierarchies of importance. Holmes → Montaigne → Ortega → Perec: a journey that goes from the intuition that life is made of the small to the deliberate decision to stop and observe what usually goes unnoticed.

Perhaps Holmes's phrase can ultimately be read as a warning against our need to find grand explanations. We want our life to have a plot. We want to know what the decisive moment was, what event turned us into who we are, what the reason was, what the cause was. But perhaps the answer is far less satisfying. Perhaps there was no single event. Perhaps there were thousands. Perhaps none was enough. Perhaps a person ends up being who they are through an impossible-to-reconstruct accumulation of small decisions, accidents, encounters, habits, losses, readings, places, and coincidences. A great bundle. A messy handful. An accumulation. A sum. A circumstance. A succession of small things that, seen separately, seem to explain nothing, and together, constitute what we call a life.

And here Holmes's phrase acquires an unexpected force. It does not say that small things are important because they will one day lead to something big. It says something more radical: small things are important because they are most of what we have. Life does not only occur when something happens. Life also occurs when apparently nothing happens. Perhaps, after all, “nothing” is too big a word to describe all those little things.

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