What An Ant Taught Me About What Matters
I work outside on nice days, which is exactly what I was doing when an ant landed on my keyboard carrying something several times its own body size. It’s the end of summer, and it seems like the wind is blowing in the next season. Leaves, needles and seeds litter the ground around me. As I watched the ant, it looked confused, not sure where it was, what had happened and if it should resume carrying its item. After about a minute or two, it left what it was carrying and started scouting my keys, perhaps more interested in finding a scent trail home than in whatever it had just spent all that effort hauling.
I have no idea where that ant was headed, or what it lost when the wind took it off course. But I sat there and thought, that's a long trip back up to wherever you came from.
We Get Blown Off Course Too
It's not just ants. We build our whole sense of what matters around something, we're carrying it carefully, certain of its importance, and then something happens that's much bigger than what we were carrying. It gets dropped, or it disappears, or it simply stops mattering the way it did a few minutes ago.
The wind is always going to blow. The only real question is what we do once it has. Do we stand there cursing it, insisting on the importance of the thing we just lost? Or do we do what the ant did, circle back, reorient, and start looking for what actually matters now?
When Importance Gets Reframed for You
I found out how fast that reframe can happen in 2005. I had spent the last ten months studying 20 hours a week for the Hand Certification Exam, a credential that had a lot of my career riding on it, an exam with a 50% passing rate. I was on my bike when I got a call from my dad that my mom was in the ICU with pericarditis and a 50/50 chance of making it through. Within a few hours I was on a plane to San Francisco. For the next 3 weeks our world revolved around my mom. My sisters, dad and I each taking 6 hour shifts to be with my mom round the clock. In that haze, the exam suddenly didn’t seem important - something that took up so much of my life and focus fell to the bottom of the list. (I did end up taking it and passing - phew!).
Since then, I have had several unexpected shifts in my own life forcing me to shift priorities, paring the list down to the top 3 most important things because I lacked the energy for more.
We Often Put Weight On The Wrong Things
Initially it took externals to force me into reframes, now it is part of the way I see the world. When I'm overwhelmed, have a difficult relationship or when things don't work out the way I wanted, I pause and ask myself a few questions to help me see it from a different perspective. If It is completely out of my control, I let go - which is not always easy - and ask what I can learn for next time, or I reframe it as not now, or not this.
It's common to treat a terse email, a missed callback, an offhand comment in a meeting, as urgent evidence that something's wrong, when most of the time it barely deserves the real estate it takes up in our head. We turn low stakes things into high stakes ones, and before we know it, everything feels high stakes, and our nervous systems feel like they're in a five alarm fire with no way out.
The ant didn't need a crisis to figure out what mattered next. It paused to figure out what had happened, then reoriented. Most of us wait for something enormous before we're willing to ask whether the thing at the top of our list actually belongs there.
Reframing Is a Skill
It's a skill, the same way balance or focus is a skill, which means you can actually get better at it with practice. The more you practice noticing when you're giving something more weight than it deserves, and asking what actually matters right now, the faster and more automatic that shift becomes. That matters because life doesn't hold still. Work changes, relationships change, our own capacity is constantly changing, and the people who adapt well aren't the ones who never get knocked off course. They're the ones who've practiced reorienting enough times that they have the pathways to be more open and flexible.
That's resilience, really. Not toughing it out, but staying flexible enough to keep reframing as the ground shifts underneath you, whether that shift shows up at work, in a relationship, or just in an ordinary day that didn't go the way you planned.
How to reframe before a crisis forces you to
Reframing isn't complicated, but it takes practice to remember to do it in the moment, especially when emotion is involved.
Pause before reacting, especially when you notice a strong emotional charge, since emotion is often the indicator that something just got bumped higher on your priority list than it actually deserves.
Ask what you're assuming, about the person, about the event, about what it means, since most of what we're reacting to is a story we filled in ourselves, not a fact.
Get curious about at least one other way to see it, not to talk yourself out of a real problem, just to check whether the first explanation is the only one available.
The ant didn't have any of these steps spelled out for it. It just paused, gathered information, and reoriented. We're the ones with the extra stories to untangle first.
The Bottom Line
This kind of reframing, helping our nervous system stay out of the fire and building practical strategies for staying curious and flexible, is exactly what I dig into in the stress resilience workshops I teach for organizations. Reframing is a skill your team can build on purpose, to increase collaboration and effectiveness. If that's something your organization needs, I can help.
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FAQs
Why does something suddenly stop feeling important when a crisis hits?
Importance is a ranking your brain makes based on what feels most at stake in the moment. When something with much higher stakes appears, the ranking updates immediately, whether you consciously choose it or not.
Is there a way to reframe what matters without waiting for a crisis?
Yes. A simple practice is picking your top three priorities for the day or week and letting the rest wait, rather than assuming everything on your list deserves equal urgency. Most items don't hold up under that kind of scrutiny.
Why do we give some things more weight than they deserve?
Urgency and importance get confused easily. A loud, immediate thing, an email, a comment, a deadline, can feel high stakes simply because it's right in front of you, even when it wouldn't register at all a week from now.
What's a simple way to start doing this?
Pause before reacting, especially when you notice a strong emotional charge, and ask what you're assuming about the person or the situation. Then get curious about at least one other way to see it. That's usually enough to catch whether something deserves the weight you're giving it.
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