We live in a world full of conflict, with right and wrong being redefined every day. We raise and lower the bar so much when it comes to humanity, it’s like playing a bad game of limbo in which we’re either getting off easy or breaking our backs. Lately we’ve been hearing a lot about lives mattering: Black Lives Matter, Cops’ Lives Matter. Usually we’re talking about senseless violence in which people are killed or lives are changed by tragedy. Something occurred to me recently: none of our lives matter. Paradoxically, that makes all of us important, even though we don’t “matter.”
Think about something basic like a tool for a moment: if you saw the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, you recall a pivotal moment in the prehistoric prologue when one individual suddenly realized that a heavy bone could be used to break things. In real life, that was another step in our evolution, but who recorded the name of the person who did it? Nobody. We don’t see a monument in any cave dwellings, and no stories passed his name down. For all we know, it could have been a prehistoric woman who discovered tools. Anyway, that person’s life didn’t matter, but they were important.
When Shakespeare said that our evil deeds are always remembered but the good we do often goes to the grave with us, he must have realized that we don’t matter. We move history along, we invent, we create and destroy, but whether time ticks on past the history or our lives or not, we don’t matter. What happens in everyday existence is what it is, what it becomes as a result of our interference or what it ceases to be because of what happens around it.
So what are we doing, exactly? We’re evolving. We affect things in ways we won’t even see in our lifetime. We walk a street and our DNA is cast onto the ground and becomes part of the rest of the universe. That is important, because what matters is that we all have something important to contribute.
That means the rich on the top of the hill should not swat at those climbing up, but understand that the top of that hill is meant to change, and they cannot always be on top of it. Sometimes it will be empty, or it will have somebody with nothing to offer sitting there, but somebody else will get there and life will evolve and change again.
Whether you do evil or good, the world goes on with or without you. The world going on is important, and since we live on this world, we are important.
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