Significance

Hope you’re enjoying a Happy, Merry, Cheerful (HMC ??) Holiday Season. My traditional message between Christmas and New Year’s, this year, is about significance.

A buddhist friend recently suggested that, in the context of eternity, nothing is significant. So why concern yourself with anything, any affront, any act of unkindness. Just let it pass. Ultimately the offender will transition to another existence and offend no more.

It got me to thinking about the true nature of significance in our lives. What really is significant in our lives, and what is not? Why? There are good reasons to consider this more carefully than I think I do. Why waste time responding to offenses from people who are insignificant to my own life? Why invest time in trying to help insignificant people?

Important to point out that I’m not hurling “insignificant” as an epithet. I’m referring to people who are insignificant to my own life. People whose actions really don’t affect me in any way. Why do I feel badly when someone who doesn’t impact my life insults me? Like a bully in a public place? Or some shortsighted person on Facebook commenting on something I posted?

This second example got me thinking about what social media has quietly done to our overall existence that is nothing short of miraculous. It has added a fourth dimension to us!

Yes, we still live in a three-dimensional world of height, width, and depth, but now our relationships span far more than the people we currently interact with. Now we interact with people we’ve known from throughout our lives. From childhood to grade school to secondary school to college to the well-known “real world of work.” Every job. They’re all back in our lives and for some reason I, for one, have considered them all to be significant.

They could be, but they may not be. One thing I’ve figured out is that they’re not all significant just because they’ve been in my life at some point. In fact, reading their reports of the current state of their lives and the choices they’ve made, many are people who slipped out of my life for very good reasons that are, sadly, still true today.

By now there’s probably a sizable “so what” brewing.

Here’s the “so what.” I just don’t have the bandwidth to keep in touch with all of these people in a meaningful way. Also, I often regret getting involved with many of these people again. I have no desire to share the pettiness and the lack of courage they exhibit in not taking responsibility for their own choices. The world is against them, to hear them tell it. I’ve come to know better. The only person who can defeat you is you.

As a result I have shortchanged the people who I really do consider to be significant to try to be there for the people who really are insignificant. This is closely akin to the Buddha’s concept of eliminating toxic people from your life. I’d take it a step further and recommend eliminating insignificance from your life, as you define significance.

So here’s how this ties into a holiday/new year message.

For this holiday, give yourself the gift of significance in your own life, and share the fact that you find certain people to be significant with those people themselves. Tell your significant others that they are significant to you. I just apologized to someone for not making enough time to keep in touch with him sufficiently, realizing it was because I was so busy trying to “help” or “save” others who weren’t as significant to me, but seemed to need my help.

I’m a deep believer in living a life of service to others, but I think I need to measure my own service capacity and serve first those who are significant to me, then those who are less significant, then those who have need beyond significance to me. I recognize that people have earned my perception of significance through acts of kindness and benevolence that deserve recognition in my life. I’m going to work harder in 2018 to reserve my energies so I can serve those people first.

Hope 2017 has been a significant year in your life, and 2018 proves to be even moreso.

HMC