What Matters To You?

What matters to you? As in, what actually matters to you? Recent times have forced many to ask this question, including myself. The humbling nature of the pandemic has caused many to face the fact that most of what they do is completely unimportant in the grand scheme of what actually matters. I felt this way myself. I felt as if most of what I do each day is just noise, to look busy and to be perceived to be doing things.

Most of the brainless activities we do like scrolling social media are just distractions from what really matters, experiences to fill the time between the working week and sleeping. When you’re forced to stay at home and stare at the walls, you have no choice but to evaluate your entire life.

In my experience, this can be a very painful thing to do which is why I think many bury their heads in work or even substances. You can discover that you’re not really where you want to be or have the things you once set out to acquire. You’re then forced to explore if the things you always wanted were important or not in the first place.

The pandemic made it very obvious that all that really matters is people, not monetary gain or self-serving acquisitions. Most of the things we pine over are just temporary ideas, they’re not things we cry for when we’re in a dire situation. In a busy, normal, world, these things seem important but in a world where the veil is temporarily pulled back, they are suddenly revealed as not relevant.

What use is a big house and lots of money in the bank when you’re lying in a hospital bed with a dangerously high temperature? You would trade everything you have for your health and the love of your family, things that many of us neglect as we live very busy but very unimportant routines.

You begin to wonder why you never checked in with your friends, or your family or why you didn’t spend more time reading with your children.

As a child, there’s an endless pool of things that can seemingly matter to you. However, you have to eventually start letting things go or you will find yourself trapped in the past unable to let go of ideas that died a long time ago and that are just weighing you down, not allowing you to move forward.

When the dark introspective days of the Covid pandemic came, I found I could count on one hand the number of things that truly matter to me.

It became obvious to me that I was holding on to things that I didn’t care about at all whilst all the while telling myself they were vital to who I was or at least, who I wanted to be.

A field of dead ideas

During this period I remembered all of the grand ideas I’d had up until that point. I remembered all the hobbies I told myself I’d start, jobs I would pursue or courses that I’d one day take. I looked back and saw a field full of those dead ideas that I once had, each of them each calling me to embrace them, almost teasing me, telling me there was still time. I was still listening to them.

What really matters to you?

I realised that I had a good number of friends but only two or three I could really count on if I needed to. I was reminded of the unconditional support my family had always given me, something that is so unbelievably amazing to have, but something I had always taken for granted. What would my life be like if I had no one to rely on? No rock in the cold hard light of day? No doubt I would be a completely different person, colder, more self-involved.

I thought about each year of my life up until that point and remembered the faces of every person I had known that had left an impression on me or shaped me in some way. Faces that had until that point been stored in the back of my mind and labelled as ‘unimportant’. However, each of them with their views and their mannerisms got under my skin at one point in time, connecting us forever.

I thought about how close we used to be and how strange it was that most of those people were now strangers. I wondered if we didn’t talk anymore because we were lazy and life just got in the way or if we were just useful to each other at the time, all those years ago. I asked; ‘what really matters?’ and “who really matters?’

Does it matter if you can’t feel it?

Does something really matter if you can’t feel it? I’ve had a lot of experiences but I don’t remember many of them. I unintentionally categorise many of them as forgettable and as such, discard them. Why?

Whilst in my state of reflection, I mostly remembered all the things I had deeply felt over the years. I gave thought to my first day of pre-school, one of my earliest memories. Why? Perhaps because it was the first time I felt intense pain. The feeling in that moment of looking over the wall and seeing my mother disappear for the first time was intensely terrifying.

The feeling of the teenage heart-breaks cut through my stomach over the years with different faces but the same painful feeling. Being betrayed by my best friend was painfully disturbing. Passing my driving test was a gleefully freeing sensation. Falling in love with my now wife and knowing even then that it was a real relationship was intensely exciting. Holding my son, my best friend, for the first time was a feeling that I still cannot describe with words.

The things that I feel the most are the things I remember the most but are they important? I’m not convinced. After all, there are only so many things you can truly care about at once. These things are more like painful or joyful lessons.

So, what matters to you?

What matters to you? After all, different things will matter to different people, however, I think everything can be stripped back to one underpinning thing that holds us all up from the roots like pillars that give a life real stability and substance.

I don’t care about my phone, my TV or my car, not really. These are just tools to make my life a little easier to navigate. They matter to me when my life is going well but underneath these tools is the most important thing – the love of other people.

After everything we have been through, I want to concentrate on the things really that matter, the things that make my life feel like it has substance. Even though I know I will get caught up in distractions from time to time, I feel as if I’ve had a reset and will go forward remembering what really matters and what I should focus most of my time on more often than I did before.