What Matters?
Author: Bill Quateman

Beyond food and shelter, our next greatest need is to matter.
-David J. Walker

What can I do? Where do I start? How do you matter?

What would our contribution be, in some way, to making a difference? How would we go about helping the life of another person? How can we best help ourselves? How does it benefit us to help? What are we willing to give? What are we willing to give up? What are ways we might “contribute something”?

Life’s most urgent question is: What are you doing for others?
-Dr. Martin Luther King

Is it time? Is it money? Energy? Will we give attention? Knowledge? Will we give hope? Will we give freely? Openly?

Inevitably, what we must give is something of ourselves.

Law of the universe. Knowing and living this is what it takes to move onward in life.

you get what you give
and of everything,
that is the most truth

What can we do that is the most powerful? We can care.

The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one. The only gift is a portion of thyself.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

We can care enough about ourselves, to care about what happens to someone else. We can realize that that’s what’s real, the whole deal, plain and clear. We’re all hooked up. We can realize that caring for someone else is caring for ourselves. We can care about the connectedness and our relation instead of some imagined separateness, made seemingly real only by our mistaken belief.

The great mythologist and teacher, Joseph Campbell, gives us a natural world metaphor. It is of the mama bird whose babies are actually larger than her after awhile, because she goes out and gets food, eats it, then regurgitates it for THEM to eat.

As fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, brothers or sisters, as makers of families, as makers of the world, this is what we do, in our right minds. This is how we matter.


Generosity brings happiness at every stage of its expression.
We experience joy in forming the intention to be generous.
We experience joy in the actual act of giving something.
And we experience joy in remembering the fact that we have given.
-The Buddha

This is true for whatever family we’re from or find. This is true in line at the grocery store.

We come to see that the earth doesn’t need to be saved, people do.

Myth: we have to save the earth. Frankly, the earth doesn’t need to be saved. Nature doesn’t give a hoot if human beings are here or not. The planet has survived cataclysmic and catastrophic changes for millions upon millions of years. Over that time, it is widely believed, 99 percent of all species have come and gone while the planet has remained. Saving the environment is really about saving our environment---making it safe for ourselves, our children, and the world as we know it. If more people saw the issue as one of saving themselves, we would probably see increased motivation and commitment to actually do so.
-Robert M. Lilienfeld and William Rathje

Giving IS getting. We need to begin by talking about it.

We’re at a fulcrum moment, a kairos moment in history. Everything that everyone does matters enormously. We use dark likelihoods…as incentives to dream up something much larger. We realize, whatever we speak to, we wake it up.
-Caroline W. Casey

The Mayan word for human means, one who owes. It is in the sense of contributing a gift.

The meaning of therapy is to heal, the deeper meaning is, to serve the gods.

There’s reciprocity, a return with creation in these meanings that are always present, just below the surface. We need these meanings in our lives today.

Anything good you’ve ever been given is yours forever.
-Rachel Naomi Remen

What if there was critical mass in this kind of thinking?

If we are still, look closely and see clearly (still, close & clear-only three of the miracles) the irrefutable truth is, the inescapable understanding is that we, each of us, matter; to ourselves and to each other.

Knowing this, is where we start.

It also becomes apparent that our every action, our every deed, word, and thought, no matter how slight or inconsequential it may seem, has an implication not only for ourselves but for all others too.
- The Dalai Lama






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About the Author

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