Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Do we matter?

Everywhere I go, I see corporate campaigns. "____ matters!" Outreach consisting of imploring statements about value. This commonality -- that everyone is doing it -- is perhaps a reflection on an increasingly troubling state: bombarded with information overload, how do we REACH people anymore? How can we insert ourselves into the hearts of those around us? Puppies are dying and kittens are homeless and children are starving and forests are disappearing and people are illiterate and ohmygod, how do we rally support? Public giving reflects our pinched economy and the oversaturation of those things that tug on heartstrings.

And it exists on a personal level too. Do I matter? Did I matter? Was I important even in a small way? Even Gotye intoned this in the hit devoured by the hungry lovelorn: "But you didn't have to cut me off... make out like it never happened and that we were nothing." 

Can you have mattered even if your time with that person has ended? Why does it feel like all the nice things are erased just because they're not current? Maybe it is because we don't always get to hear, "Hey, you were really important to me. Thank you. I will never forget that."

So many conversations inside the head, so few make it out.

4 comments:

  1. I like how you always make me think of things in a different way. An emotionally exploratory way. "Why does it feel like all the nice things are erased just because they're not current?" I like this.

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    1. Thank you so much, that really means a lot!

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  2. Glad to hear from this internal conversation...

    I will say that you are hardly alone in your thinking.

    Having met and talked with a friend that lost her mother Monday. I realized that she was pondering her significance and loss of the relationship she had with her Mom. She admitted that she has not fully realized that her Mom was gone but believed the relationship was over, it had ended. I assured her that the relationship, to include both nature (sharing 23 chromosomes) and nurture, will always have an effect on so many of her decisions, thoughts, perceptions and life lessons; has not, and will not ever completely end. She will always have the good and the bad the ups and downs, frustrations and every other memory as part of her. All of this will affect the way we interact with the world in some way. Thus we still have relationships, though distant, are still ever present.
    - B

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  3. All things end.
    I think what matters is to behave in a way that is consistent with who you are at the time, and try to improve yourself.
    When it does end, who you were at the time still matters, and still affects how you act in the future...

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