When I found out what was happening with EPW’s daughter Gracie, I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear it for Elizabeth and I didn’t want to hear it for Gracie, but most of all I simply didn’t want to hear it for me.
I have two kids. One of them is Gracie’s age. And a few years ago, we had a little scare. It turned out to be nothing, and even if it had turned out to be something, the worst case scenario would have been a few days in the hospital. But even that — that smallish incident that involved my son, that was totally out of my control — knotted my stomach and made everything else in my life irrelevant for a little while.
So I can’t imagine what these two are going through. I don’t want to imagine it. I’d give anything in Elizabeth’s shoes. And I’m sure she’d give anything, too. When one of your kids is at stake, everything else is irrelevant. You don’t weigh costs in a situation like this. You simply pay them.
Which led to a really interesting realization.
The epiphany
If one of my kids faced a mortal threat, I would do pretty much anything to fix it if I could. If any member of my family was gravely ill, I’d be willing to offer up whatever it took to solve the situation if possible.
If giving up my house would solve the problem (it probably wouldn’t, but we’re thinking here), then I’d give up my house in a heartbeat.
If it was a gun-to-their-heads situation and someone said, “Give up all of your money. Cash in every asset you have. Siphon off all business income, and then fold up the business you’ve built through blood, sweat, and tears,” I’d do it without hesitation.
There’s really nothing I wouldn’t give up. Everything that seemed so vital and important would be fair game. All of the goals I’ve striven for would be meaningless and up for grabs. If literally my only choices were losing someone versus keeping a healthy family but living on the streets with nothing, I’d take life on the streets.
I’m not just trying to be noble here or to paint an overly dramatic picture to show everyone that I personally feel EPW’s situation seriously sucks. I’m making a real point.
If you’d give up your house to save someone, then your house doesn’t matter.
If you’d give up your business, your stuff, or abandon your goals, then those things don’t matter.
If you’ve finally gotten a glimpse of “living your truth” day-to-day, and a choice arose between keeping it and saving the life of one of your kids, and if the choice you’d make would be to give up that shiny new truth, then living your truth doesn’t matter.
Ask yourself what the handful of things are that you’d sacrifice everything else to save. Really think about it, and think hard.
Those things — the things for which you’d give up everything else — are what matters.
I’ve got a point here. I promise.
This may feel like an exercise in hyperbole. I mean, it’s pretty unlikely that someone is going to say, “Give up your love of Dachshunds and we’ll spare your life!”
Then there’s that thing where in the drama of the moment you promise your deity of choice that you’ll give up smoking if he/she does what you want, but then after things are better, you pick up your Camels and get back to business because there’s not exactly a binding contract in force. So a lot of promises to sacrifice end up being empty anyway.
You’re likely not going to be asked to “trade it all” to save a life, and even if you promise it all for the hell of it, chances are you won’t be forced to hold up your end of the deal.
But ask yourself: If you WERE asked to trade it all, and if you WOULD HAVE TO actually do so, would you do it?
And then, even if you get to keep everything anyway, go forward knowing that you’d let it go if you had to. Go forward in life looking at your car, your house, your stereo, your job, your Caribbean vacation, whatever — and knowing that it was something that didn’t matter worth a shit when the chips were down.
Even if you get to keep everything, know what all of that stuff actually is. Go forward with the knowledge that it’s all quite meaningless in the big picture.
If you do this little exercise, you’ll see that everyday life has few horrors, because the threats are almost always to things that don’t matter anyway.
How to be unafraid
I feel gut-wrenchingly terrible for Elizabeth and Gracie because they’re facing a threat to something that matters. It’s really rare when that happens, though. So send them your thoughts and prayers and possibly some falafel, and then, when you return to your own life, run through this little exercise and I’m betting 99% of you will see that your fears and worries are about things that don’t matter.
Look, I don’t want to be an insensitive dick here. If someone is losing their house, I do feel bad for them, and it’s natural for that to bother anyone. But you have to be honest. To take an extreme case, sometimes a person will lose a house due to medical bills — say, a kidney transplant for Mom or sepsis treatment for themselves. If that’s you, ask yourself: If you could undo Mom’s kidney transplant or allow your own sepsis to kill you but you could save the house in doing so, would you do it?
No?
Well, then I feel bad for you, but the truth is that the house simply does not fucking matter. Sorry.
We all have ups and downs, but if they’re the kind of concerns that would be dwarfed by a life-critical situation, they don’t matter. If you’re $3 million in debt and it crushes your spirit every day, I’d guess it’s kind of likely that you’d forget to worry about it if suddenly you were told you had a month to live.
Right?
Then the debt doesn’t matter. It sucks, but it’s temporary. It’s “a lifestyle thing only.”
I doubt that any of us, in order to keep ourselves and our loved ones alive, are going to be asked to eat garbage and live under a bridge. And I know that when money is tight or a divorce is happening, comparing those things to life-or-death is of little consolation. I’m not saying that we should happily accept the bad things in our lives because they could be worse, and I’m not saying that your dreams and goals and truth-living are so irrelevant that you should give up on them and allow life to crush your soul. I’m not asking you to stagnate and stop growing. I’m not asking you to give up anything, or allow shittiness to persist in your life.
I’m just asking you to put them in perspective. Ultimately, in the big picture, things either matter or they do not.
Feel free to work on those things that “don’t matter.” Please do, in fact.
But when things go wrong, you can’t let it get you down for long. You can’t let it crush you. If you feel upside-down, or like you’re floundering, or if you feel like a failure or as if the walls are crashing down, ask yourself, “Am I losing the things that truly matter? Or is this just more stuff I’d trade in a heartbeat if I had to?”
I see people all the time facing “tragedy” and they label it “tragedy,” and it’s not tragedy. It’s a setback. It’s a bump in the road. It’s meaningless.
Once you realize that the failed business deal, the bankruptcy, and the lawsuit are simply inconvenient, you suddenly get a hell of a lot more resourceful and powerful.
Figure out what matters. And realize the relative meaninglessness of the rest.
You’ll be amazed at the freedom it gives you.
#thatisall
About the Author: Johnny B. Truant couldn’t stop thinking of the Metallica song “Nothing Else Matters” when writing this. He’s also currently setting up self-hosted WordPress blogs for free over at his website until July 23rd. He hadn’t intended to advertise that yet, but what the hell, you know?
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I'm Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, a writer, teacher, and coach.