Don't Be Invisible

I'm trying to hold myself to a different standard when I go out into the world, and when I am hiding inside my apartment.

"How much did it matter that I was here?"

You can make the touchy-feely assertion that you always matter, and that simply by sitting in front of your computer or scratching yourself, you are appreciating the gift of life.

I won't argue there. In my touchier-feelier moments, I probably agree with you. Being alive matters, whatever you might be doing in the moment.

On a less cosmic level, though, there is the question of how much, in any given moment, your actions are affecting the world around you.

I often ask myself, "How much would this situation be different if I wasn't here?" It's scary how often the answer is, "Not by much."

I go to the store, lost in my own world. I pick out my groceries, pay for them, and come home. I barely talk to anybody outside of some forced pleasantries.

What did I do? I floated through the world, past hundreds of people, and I never left my own tiny bubble. I didn't change anything around me.

If I hadn't been there, it's likely that things would have gone exactly as they had, or pretty close to it.

I sit in my room, reading online, listening to music, watching a movie. The world swirls around my apartment. I do nothing to alter the swirl.

I used to fancy myself an observer of social situations. I swore that those situations needed someone who didn't contribute anything to them.

That now seems wrong-headed to me. I wish I had jumped in and changed things a little.

You're not a bad person if you don't affect the world. But I believe you are selling yourself short . You are wasting chances to flaunt your human-ness, to assert the fact that you exist.

A lot of people seem downright apologetic about the fact that they are alive. They never say, or even think, as much, but that's how they carry themselves.

That manifests itself in being overly quiet, in being unwilling to jump into social situations or give their opinion about anything. In being unwilling to affect the world in any way.

Most people want to leave their mark on the world before they die. That's selfish on one level, but it's also the right of every living thing. I'm wondering if it's also a responsibility.

If you don't leave your mark, you are making a beeline for the grave with your eyes staring at the ground. When you do that, you lived, you breathed, you mattered in a cosmic sense - but you wasted your opportunity to matter in other, equally important ways.