My daughter - who roars at zoo lions, Tiggers and Pooh bears - is scared of ants.

Not "aunts" as in grammar-correcting spinsters who tie their hair in buns and clutch rulers to rap your knuckles with: aunts who'd scare anyone. Insect ants.

"Look how tiny he is," I tell my still-tiny daughter, allowing one object of her nightmares to climb my wrist, weaving upside-down through an arm- hair forest toward my shoulder ... Where's he going? Eyes? Nose? Ears? And from there to where? ... but my soothing words are to no avail.

Her terrors have not yet reached the sophistication that lets us grown- ups blunder blithely, afraid of only what is obvious, while small matters like split atoms, infected microchips, print on contracts, mobile decimal points and commas escape our notice until too late.

I want to teach her valuable life lessons when I learn them. For instance, how to run fast without training so hard I hurt myself. Or, conversely, how to stay healthy by training slowly and still get fast.

I know I must strike a balance, but I don't know where that balance is. I am not an ant who can run rightside-up and then upside-down to reverse my blood flow so some of it goes to my brain on occasion. I have to think.

I was doing so while running the other day, calibrating the mileage and pace I needed compared to yesterday's and tomorrow's ... in fact, for the next weeks and months and years ... to achieve body harmony and to optimize my performance, when I tripped on a root I'd not noticed, looking ahead so far, and fell on my face.

As my Aunt Nellie said, it's the little things that get you. But, for balance, we'd better credit the big things and everything in between.

They'll all do you in.