It’s easier when you keep the “Big Picture” in mind.

Have you ever felt held hostage by the calendar, the clock and the mundane? Do you wish for the opportunity to just let your mind soar in the stratosphere of imagination and original thought rather than pay bills, prepare expense account reports, make agendas, review the quarterly financials and list goals? In 1930, mathematician John von Neumann created such a haven – the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. It was intended to provide a gathering place for the world’s greatest thinkers – such company as von Neumann, Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel. Neils Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Robert Oppenheimer, Freeman Dyson, and many other brilliant men followed.

The lure of the Institute was its sole requirement: its “professors” had only to practice their thinking. No undergraduate classes to teach. No papers to grade. No doctoral candidates to mentor. An administrative staff to run the place. An endowment to pay the bills. The Institute for Advanced Study was a thinker’s paradise.

So here’s von Neumann – driving down the road one day, thinking, which he’s supposed to do, when he realizes he has to call home. “Hi, honey,” he says. “Why am I going to New York?”

The absent-minded professor. Head in the clouds; details out the window. We laugh because we can believe it and perhaps because we are a little bit jealous.

One time when von Neumann’s wife was ill and had a fever, she requested a glass of ice water. Von Neumann eagerly went off to fetch it, got a few feet down the hall, only to retrace his steps. “Honey, where do we keep the glasses?”

The Institute’s founding philosophy naturally led to generosity on payday. Von Neumann could afford to sit around and think all day, and he loved it. Others, bless their hearts, were on hand to deal with details and chores. A genius has theories to consider.

Ah, to be such a genius, endowed and supported beyond the limit of what’s necessary! Isn’t this a wish we all have indulged in, begrudging reality enough to at last dream of unrealistic simplicity?

Von Neumann, a smart man who constructed some of his own luck, favored himself with a lifestyle that allowed him to keep much of the mundane at bay, but even von Neumann had to stop each night to sleep, fix a flat ever so often, and invest time to form friendships and nurture love. Hunting for the water glasses is only a tiny example of the noble tedium which pervades our lives.

The point here is an inconvenient fact: tedium exists. It won’t go away. It’s an inescapable part of every job, whether the job is selling widgets, running the company that makes the widgets, lecturing to the company that wants to sell even more widgets, caring for the sick, teaching the young, or contemplating the Theory of Everything.

When a sense of crisis is absent, it is sometimes difficult to remember why tending to the details is important and consequential. They so often only feel like so much fuss-and-bother, demanding and unfulfilling.

There’s an instinct in us that says life is supposed to be a noble and dignified experience. That’s difficult to remember when the paperwork is still piled high at the end of the day and you need to stop at the store for milk on the way home. You’ve been there – when the endlessness of the mundane threatens to obliterate your sense of higher purpose.

The antidote is to stay focused on your goals while remembering your deeper purpose. After all, if Mother Theresa can deal with the temporal filth and squalor of Calcutta’s slums and still maintain such dignity and inner strength, surely we can resolve to stay focused on a purpose beyond our paperwork? Everyone has to cope. How can we expect less of ourselves than what we try to teach a child in the same circumstances – no taking it out on others, no yelling, no throwing things, respect others and obey the Golden Rule.

Children learn that life has rainy days, chores, and the unpleasant reality that you don’t always get what you want. We tell them that pouting and hiding will not help. Apathy doesn’t work. Reality doesn’t go away just because you try to ignore it.

Life seems to keep us in a middle zone, where we are given the opportunity to guide our energies, but never really have control. This is an inconvenient truth, but children have to learn it. Adults, too, would do well to remember it.

Managing the daily routine can be a more infuriating test of our dignity than occasional crisis. The trick is to remember how your efforts tie to the big picture. The task at hand, whatever it is, will still be tedious, but it will be noble tedium. Focus is always a safe and effective medicine against boredom and the mundane.

Jim Tunney, Ed.D., has been an educator and served for 20 years as a high-school administrator. Since 1960 he has refereed for the NFL and is known by many as the “dean of referees.” He is president of Jim Tunney Associates. For information about Dr. Tunney’s speaking schedule or motivating audio tape packages, please write P.O. Box 1500, Carmel-By-The-Sea, CA 93921 or call 408/659-3200.