Sometimes it seems as if life is full of minor irritations and frustrations, none of which is actually in the least important. Putting the laundry through, getting that report finished, checking the oil in the car, buying more bread because it’s running out before the weekly shop, phoning your mum, rearranging an appointment, paying a bill, finishing an essay, posting a letter. Lots of them involve other people too – you have to keep calling someone until you catch them, you can’t rearrange the appointment until you’ve spoken to your boss, you need to speak to your tutor before you can complete the essay.

Wouldn’t it be great if all these little things would stop getting in the way, and you could actually find the time to live life properly? If you added up all the time you spend on these inconsequential actions and interactions, you’d have so much more time to enjoy life.

You might think that, but you’d be wrong. Because, strange as it may seem, all those million tiny actions and preoccupations are in fact what constitute life. Like a pointillist painting, all those little dots – if viewed from a great enough distance – make up the big picture. And that’s a good thing. Take them away, and actually there’s nothing much left. A close friend of mine who lost her husband tells me that for a while after he died, she really resented the everyday niggles and necessities of life. She just ignored them for a few weeks because she could – for once no one expected anything of her. But once they’d faded into the background, she found there was nothing to replace them. She realised that they weren’t, in fact, a negative frustration. They were a positive thing that needed to be embraced. The spaces between things turned out to be more important than the things themselves.

That’s not to say that there aren’t any big things, but most of them are made up of little things. You might devote your whole life to charity, but you’d still be frustrated when the relief parcels didn’t arrive on time, or you’d have to nip out to get milk before your next meeting, or remember to feed the cat. Suppose you had a more hedonistic view, and decided life would be one long holiday. There’d still be timetables and tide-tables and food to sort out and running out of clothes and losing your keys.

I’ll bet even the Pope has days when he can’t work out where his favourite socks have got to. Or the President of the USA has to find time to brief his assistant to dig out all his receipts to give to his accountant. Or the Queen suddenly remembers she meant to give a particular birthday present to a lady-in-waiting and has to sort it out in a hurry. That’s life. And I do mean it – that really is life. It’s all there is in the end. Enjoy it.