by The details of family can either run you ragged or bind you to a conscious choice to attend to them. While we are discouraged from sweating the small stuff, we need to remember to respect the little things as well. Details tend to be seen as burdens, but they can and do ground us in a world spinning too fast. Just as a small gesture can change a moment—or, indeed, a life—attending to the details can change our framework and make the world a better place.

I have always seemed to have one of my mind’s channels attuned to the small. I could have been, perhaps, and engineer or an acupuncturist, but my ability to see details is not exacting. I see them more like mosaics: separate, and part of, the big picture.

I did, in fact, become a nurse and thus used the details to help care for my patients, I have great jobs with great bosses whose efforts required someone else to sift through and prioritize the details. The overall p[icture had more depth and the patients received better care,. The little things mattered to them, made them feel safe and cared for.

When my son was born profoundly brain injured, my life became a composite of a whole new set of details. Initially, as with all newborns, taking care of his basic needs required my full attention. Unlike most babies, though, his physical dependence did not wane with time. The details of his days were always painful and urgent; each day a carbon copy of the day before. My days were filled with angst; the night brought no respite. The details began to crowd my psyche—a surprise to me, for whom such things always were a comfort, a natural ease.

Living, breathing grief began to force me to concentrate on other details or succumb to despair. Thus began my surrender to, and appreciation for, the littlest details, the infinitesimal pieces of the grand mosaic that was my life.

Each moment that I could quiet him, I looked for the smallest common denominator. In time, painfully slow time, small but open windows of opportunity began to appear. As I let go of the notion that he would ever see, speak or move, I began to focus on his comfort alone. If he didn’t have to struggle for every little thing, there was a possibility that serenity might open his otherwise small world. Once I had a big picture on which to focus, the details came to me.

Though the details have changed over the course of his life, they remain essential to his survival. Every day still begins a systems check, as he cannot move or verbalize: eyes for eyelashes; ears and lungs for infection; in between fingers and toes for fungus; head-to-toe skin for breakdown. His meals require enough texture to swallow, but not enough to choke. He drinks from a sippy cup that we hold, even though he is 15. He needs enough movement to stave off contracts, yet not so much that he breaks his fragile bones. He understands our tone, but not our words.

All of these essential details are part of my love for him.

Focusing on these has caused me to slow down and become privy to the essential details of life in general. While feeding him, I watch the same Inca doves return to our playscape: fledglings learn to fly from the same space my other sons, now teenagers, used to jump; migrating monarchs feed from blooming lantana that had been cut to ground, apparently dead, the previous winter. Thousands of walks with him through my neighborhood—past new gardens, aging trees, newborn babies—have bound me to this home like no other. I have savored the childhoods of my two younger sons here—home when they left for school and home when they returned.

It is not the devil in the details, as the saying goes, but rather life itself to be found within. I have seen that, in taking care of the details, my son’s world, albeit small, is peaceful, rich and loving. It makes me believe that, if we all took care of the details, the bigger world—everyone and everything in it—would be better for it.