Two Sides to the Same Coin of Life: Small things of significance
All is paradox. Tim Ferris shared in his Five Bullet Friday a few weeks back, a chapter from the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, entitled Cosmic Insignificance Therapy. You should take the time to read it. It is challenging and beautiful. The summary is, there is value in considering ourselves in a long view of time and concluding, as the James 4:14 passage does, “You are vapor.” Here today, gone tomorrow. Insignificant.
The beauty of this mindset is a relief from the existential pressure to matter in any sort of historically significant way. No doubt, social media has only exacerbated our public perspective of significance with likes and followers and comments counted as an observable and seemingly objective viewpoint of how much we matter at scale. But the beauty of this article is a reflection of what we observed during the pandemic. When time stopped. When so much our professional doing came to a halt and suddenly we were home, together as families, blood and chosen. Taking walks, sharing food and grocery runs with neighbors, heightened in our awareness of the real inequities of our society and with the time to do something about it. Suddenly, the small things were the things of significance.
We went to Target at specific times to allow those in our community with food stamps to go first. Same for the elderly. We systematically and individually loved our neighbors as ourselves. I’m not sure what could be more significant than that.
On one side of the coin, yes, “meaningless, meaningless, life is meaningless.” But on the other side of the coin was a chance to drive across icy streets buying up formula and diapers for the moms in need who usually took the bus but there was no bus service to be taken. Equally as stunning was the chance to cook and be together as a complete family, at home, day after day, and night after night because…time. Small things of great significance.
On the other side of the coin, you being here now, the odds are almost zero. It’s been quoted as one in 400,000 trillion but this article gets down into that math and when all variables are considered, it is only fair to consider the reality of you is a miracle, something with almost no probability. Something that had almost no chance of happening, then happening, well that is, by definition, mathematically significant. And if you’re bent beyond the material and into the spiritual, then I’d say, it does feel significant at some sort of cosmic level.
But the weight of our aliveness, maybe doesn’t have to spur us to think we could be the next, well the next anything. Fill in the blank of your ego’s greatest manifestation. But it could spur us to examine our lives and ask some of those big existential questions - not from the ego who craves that significance - but from the heart, the soul, the true self - who, when studied in a scientific way, wants to love and be loved, is curious, compassionate, connected to others and the world.
Peter would say that sense of existential dread and pressure we feel, is not just about significance. It’s about freedom and choice. “The dirty little secret is your life is in your hands,” he’d say to me. “And you might not like that.” It’s about deciding what this life is really about, what matters most and living accordingly. Not to be famous but to live with integrity, that is to say, integrated, in the ever present here and now which is the only reality we know.
There might not be historical record (or an instagram post) of the ways in which you move the cosmic needle by giving half of your sandwich and your bottle of water to the man on the corner with the cardboard sign or the extra time you took to cook the fish the way your daughter liked it or to let your neighbors dog out or the study of divine nature and creativity you do with your one neighbor, but if there is an arc to the universe and if it is bending towards love and justice, then let the weight of each small choice, of your two small coins, tip the scale.