Keep Calm, and…well, you know.

Some days, you feel small. Some days, you don’t feel like you mean a whole lot. Some days, you have to “cope with the fact that you are a bag of meat sitting on a rock in outer space and that someday you will die and you are completely powerless, helpless, and insignificant in the wake of this beautiful cosmic shitstorm we call existence” (thanks to theoatmeal.com).

You know the days. Your alarm wakes you up earlier than you needed, you’re late to class or work or whatever engagement that you don’t particularly want to be at, traffic is unusually awful, you drop your bagel after only one bite, people aren’t tipping you well at all at work, the little things just keep piling up, and the universe seems to be out to get you by just tearing at you, bit by bit by bit, until you’re just defeated.

Those are the times when you want to give up. You want to drop to your knees and ask why it must insist on pouring when it rains. You want to crawl under the sheets and close out the world. You want to slip into a mini coma until the day is over and everything is peachy again.

But you don’t.

You don’t do any of that.

You square up your shoulders. You stiffen up your upper lip. And you realize that the world is not out to slowly dismantle you. And you realize that the little things, are just little things. And no matter how many little things there are, no matter how much you multiply those little, tiny nuances by, they still don’t add up to a whole lot. You take a deep breath.

And you carry on.