you are here now, alive and conscious, able to experience the world

 

Stormy weather here, even had some rain. That's how I would have started a phone call to my father. We always talked about the weather first of all, he in more detail in relation to all things agricultural. Anyway, autumn is early this year. I had the flu shot and then the covid shot and for about three days it felt a bit like having been knocked over by something big and heavy but I pretended this was nothing and so we went to the museum and cycled back home through the park where the geese are grazing and one day we went uphill deep into the forest where autumn does its wonders best of all. But still. The downside of autumn is that when it's over, it's winter and that's not a season I am fond of.

The thing is that I feel the cold, always have, always the kid with frozen toes and fingers, hence always the first trudging home when we were out skating or sledging or skiing and whatever stuff kids did during the long Franconian winters. Back home my mother would have to alternatingly dip my feet into bowls of warm and cold water to wake them up from their frozen stupor while I tried not to cry because my mother was of big fan of heroics. Also, I never really liked snowmen and avoided snowball fights if at all possible. 

So the state of things is beautifully autumnal and shitty dark, depending how we look at it. 

I recently joined a small group of people for a listening project. It involves pairing off into twos and going for a walk for 45 minutes. Before we go, we are given a piece of paper with a prompt/question and the task is that first one and then the other person gets a fixed time period each to speak on that prompt while the other person does nothing but listen. The prompt is fairly basic, like "is there something that made you happy, worry, laugh" etc. and nothing but listen means, no eye contact, no nodding, no touching or sighs or whatever, just listening and giving the other person the space and time to talk, no responding, no solutions offered and so on - unless the speaker gives you permission. It's quite a thing to listen without your mind trying to respond or react or having to provide an answer or a solution and it's quite a thing to be able to just talk without interruption yet knowing that the other person is really listening and just that. I realise it's hard to describe and it's something that requires concentration and empathy on a different level than the usual let's-have-a-talk or I-am-here-to-help you scenarios. I never met any of the people in the group before, I only know their first names and it's a different person I get to walk with every time. I think it's a bit like one of these 12-step groups from the movies or at least how I imagine them.

Perhaps this is what we need to do, creating moments of community and loyalty in everyday life and remaining human, not allowing our own indifference or our own self-importance to take hold. Even when it is most difficult, even when we are exhausted. (Maybe this is also the only reliable strategy for confronting criminal politicians and power structures.)

The liberation of insignificance: it lets you focus on what actually matters to you, right now, without the weight of cosmic importance crushing you. You can be kind to people because kindness feels good, without trying to tip the scales of history. You can create art because creation is satisfying, without competing for immortality. You can love people fully, knowing that love will end (one way or another) and that's fine.

There's something deeply wrong with how we've constructed meaning in the modern world. We've lost most of the traditional sources of significance (religion, community, duty) but kept the anxious feeling that we need to justify our existence. So we've turned to careers and achievements and metrics and status, trying to prove our worth to the horizon. We're all performing significance, trying to matter, desperate not to be forgotten.

But what if being forgotten is the natural state of things? What if almost everyone who has ever lived is already forgotten, and that's just how it works? There are about 100 billion humans who have lived and died, and you can probably name a few hundred of them. The rest have vanished into history, and the world keeps turning. 

I think we'd be happier if we could internalize this. Not in a nihilistic way, where nothing matters so why bother, but in a liberating way, where things matter in proportion to their actual impact on actual people, not in proportion to how much astral significance we imagine them having. 

J A Westenberg