'Lost in a Rotation of Petty Cares'

On this date, March 30, in 1751, Dr. Johnson wrote in The Rambler #108:

“Many of our hours are lost in a rotation of petty cares, in a constant recurrence of the same employments; many of our provisions for ease or happiness are always exhausted by the present day; and a great part of our existence serves no other purpose than that of enabling us to enjoy the rest.”

Something in that opening phrase tickled a muted memory: “petty cares.” Most of our cares are petty, a fact we realize only retrospectively. Lives are squandered on fretting. I traced the echo of Johnson’s phrase to an email my friend David Myers sent me on May 9, 2013, a little more than sixteen months before his death from cancer:

“I’ve been thinking how much of life is absorbed with `small cares’ that seem overwhelmingly important at the time--or at least disabling--which are forgotten in the sequel: the headaches, stomach aches, the traffic jams, the appointments which are late. Do these take up the majority of our time? They almost never make it into literature, and in fact literature seems an unstinting propaganda on behalf of the dramatic occurrences of human life. I may try to write about the `small cares,’ but I'm not sure yet what I want to say.”

You just said it, David.