As I sat down last week to write my Friday short post, I’d just been profoundly affected by a couple of paragraphs I read in a novel I had a hard time putting down. Tears began leaking and my throat closed up a little as I read them again and again. I could feel the point of what I’d just read resonating in my soul and decided to write my longer post that week about that feeling.
I intended to title the post “What Matters Most” but remembered I’d already written a post with that title. I checked to be sure, and yes, on January 10, 2023, I posted this with exactly that title.
As I read it over again, I was struck by several things. First, it’s interesting to me to reread things I’ve written a significant time after I wrote them. Though I remember writing the words and the gist of the post, it often seems to me that I wasn’t the author. In many ways I feel disconnected from the work itself. Yet I know the words are mine, based on my experiences and my thoughts.
Second, in that post I talked about my first cancer diagnosis and how my life was affected by that. Surprisingly, very shortly after that post, I got my second cancer diagnosis. I never made that connection before. The timing is interesting.
Third, what matters most isn’t about a bucket list as I wrote about in that first post. The author of the book I finished reading that morning explained in just a few words that hit me like a ton of bricks what really matters most.
The book, A Summer in Sonoma, was about four girlfriends in their late 20s, each going through very different difficulties in their lives. One was a mom with a loving husband, three kids, and a mountain of financial problems. Another was also married with a child, but whose husband after 5 years didn’t respond to her or their marriage in a way that made her want to continue to be married to him. Another woman, single, wanted desperately to have a relationship, but seemed to be great at picking losers as potential mates. And the fourth was also a single woman, a highly successful physician, who’d gone through breast cancer in her early 20s, and was now navigating a recurrence she didn’t want to tell anyone about.
I was really invested in these 4 women. The author, one of my favorites, Robyn Carr, brought them to life for me so vividly that I wanted to help them navigate their issues. In many ways, in all my years, except for the mom part, I could relate to all of their issues in a personal way.
About 7 pages from the end of the book, the two married women had happy endings to their problems. The single woman who’d attracted losers all along, had become fast friends with a man she never considered dating because he was a biker complete with tattoos, ponytail, and far more hair than she was comfortable with. He also had a secret she’d just discovered that made her mad thinking he’d been lying to her all along. And the last woman was a doctor having a physically tough time with her second bout of cancer treatment.
The passage that hit me like a ton of bricks was a conversation that took place between the woman with the biker friend and the male medical oncologist who’d developed more than doctor/patient feelings for the physician with breast cancer. Here’s how it went:
“I can’t get over the feeling he set me up, tricked me.”
“You think that?” Jerod asked. “Maybe it’s no more fun being judged good than bad.”
“He shouldn’t have kept it from me, though.”
“Perhaps not,” Jerod said. “But try to keep this in perspective, Cassie.”
“You mean, remember that he didn’t conceal a prison record, but rather a good thing?”
“No, that’s not what I mean at all. Neither one of you is sick. Please, if you care about each other, give yourselves a break. It could be so much worse.”
That’s it. That’s what really matters. So often we make mountains out of molehills, we worry about things that have virtually no consequence in our life at all. Or we focus on the 20% of something that may be bad or difficult while ignoring 80% of the same thing that may be good. We obsess about things we have no control over, or that in the great scheme of things, don’t matter any more than missing Dancing With the Stars on a Tuesday night. In many ways we are idiots, behaving stupidly, and making our lives far more difficult or negative than they are.
I have decorative signs around my house. One says Grateful for it all. Another says No Sniveling. Then there’s Dream Colorfully and Create Happiness and If Cauliflower Can Somehow Become Pizza, You Can Be Anything You Want. I am an optimist and don’t suffer pessimists gladly. I know you are what you think, so I guard my thinking carefully. Don’t be surprised at some of my nonreactions to what I’ve learned to be trivial baloney along the road of life. I’m saving those reactions for what matters most.
I think what matters most is how you can help someone else feel loved and cared about. You can’t do that with everyone, of course. But you can do it with someone.
Who will you help feel loved today? And tomorrow? And every day? Because that’s what makes life worth living and crowds out the stuff that doesn’t matter much at all.
P.S. I went to a candidate’s forum for the 4 folks who are running to be directors of the Homeowner’s Association we are part of. That, my friends, was an exercise in what does NOT matter most. I was astonished by the shallowness of some people’s lives. Not necessarily the candidates whose intent seems to be to serve, but some of the questions that had been submitted via e-mail in advance were petty, vindictive, and stupid. Good thing I didn’t have the opportunity to correlate those questions to actual people. I would have avoided them at all costs. Kind of the same reason I defriended some of my relatives on Facebook.
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