What Kabat-Zinn captures here is that our hierarchy of importance is backwards—we mentally sort life into "big" moments and "small" ones, then miss the architecture that actually holds us together. The morning coffee ritual, the way your colleague listens when you speak, the decision to pause before answering—these aren't mere fillers between the genuinely important events. A parent who notices this learns that bedtime stories aren't something to rush through on the way to "real" parenting; they're where the actual relationship lives. The quote's real power is its inversion: stop waiting for life to begin in the important bits.