The Significance of the Insignificant
Posted: Thursday, October 20, 2011
by Tex Norman
I recently read this quote by Gandhi. Again.:
Almost anything you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.I say I read it again, because I found it in a stack of 4 by 6 note cards and I copied the quote on the card in 1978. Obviously I liked the quote then, and I like it now. Still. I read somewhere that if you hit a tuning fork tuned to a particular note, that the piano wire that matches will vibrate. This quote does something like that for me. I read the quote and I feel something in me, that responds in an unexpected manner to the point of the words.
Well, I already believe that almost anything I do is going to be insignificant. I’m ordinary. In many ways I’m less than ordinary. Sometimes I’m below normal, incompetent and inferior. I don’t save lives through surgery. I don’t improve the quality of life through political power. Better living through chemistry is not going to include me. I’m not talented to the degree that it will impact the world. There is no doubt that the things I do, even the most significant things I do, are still insignificant.
Actually, for most of us, insignificance is almost a guaranteed. If you look at what you do through the macro-lens the majority of what we do has no value when you consider the BIG picture.
I did a Google search and learned that worldwide about 100 people die every minute. Each day consists of 1440 minutes times 100 dead people for each of those minutes and you get 144,000 people die each and every day. On one site the estimate was 146,000 people dying each day.
On any given day, the national news mentions maybe one or two people that died, and they are usually famous folk. Local news mentions the two or three that died in the course of a crime, a fire, or a car crash, and really, unless you know one of the victims personally, their names are heard and quickly forgotten. It is easy to see that the lives of most people matter little to most people. Theoretically you may honor life, and call every life a precious and priceless thing, and theoretically you’d be right., as a practical matter, most people’s lives seem insignificant to the rest of us.
The teenage boy that dies a tragic death in Borneo has no impact on me. You could tell me that kid’s name, describe how he died, and tell me how devastated his family or community is over his death, and I’d nod my head sadly and say, “Wow, that’s too bad,” but really, the dead kid in Borneo means little to me. His death has no perceptible impact on my life. We all have heard of the butterfly effect, so we know that, in theory, everything that happens has an impact on everything else, but really, some stuff is less significant than other stuff. If the death of 145,000 people is mostly insignificant to me, I can sort of expect that my death will be equally insignificant.
So back to my question: Why would it be important to do insignificant stuff?
I struggled with this question because I didn’t stop to consider what makes some action significant. What is significant?
Significant is an adjective. The dictionary says it means “Having or expressing a meaning, or expressing something meaningful.” Did that help anyone? Not me. That is like defining one puzzling word with a different puzzling word. There is the significant glace, which means, I guess implying something without saying it. A significant glance is body language or facial-expression language that tells others something without resorting to words. But still, why would the glance be significant?
I guess I think a synonym for significant would be important. If you say or do something important is that exactly the same thing as saying or doing something significant?
Again, the word important and the word significant imply value of the words or the act, but why it is valuable?
Significant casualtiesmean a whole lot of dead. Of course if only one or two are dead, good manners prevents us from saying those deaths are “insignificant.” It seems to me like stuff is significant if it impacts a whole lot of people. If it affects only a few people it is less significant.
So I guess what Gandhi is saying is that despite how we see ourselves, we don’t matter all that much to all mankind. Even if you could make a big splash, you’d find that most of the world would stay dry. We are insignificant and yet, according to Gandhi, what we do matters. I don’t know how many bees it takes to produce five gallons of honey, but I know it is done little by little by a lot of insignificant bees. The honey enjoyed is never credited to a particular bee yet without each one making its tiny insignificant contribution there would be no honey at all. Life is sweet.
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Top-level comments on this article: (3 total)I quote you a Proverb: A living Dog is better than a dead Lion. "Significance" is a word for reporters. We are significant to ourselves, to our loved ones, to our professional connections and to our friends. Most of all, once we are gone, our absence is felt perhaps for a little while, and then the wheel keeps turning. You however, are just somewhere else, not here, for awhile. The honey you worked on is still being tasted by the appreciative other, after you are gone. Great article.
You cannot be insignificant or do anything insignificant because all are interconnected and will affect everything else; note quantum reality, the Bufferfly effect. Chaos theory.
I'm not sure what Ghandi meant, but I think it's one of our biggest challenges, to understand that the value society places on individuals is a subjective thing. When it comes to real value - we all have exactly the same amount. We just don't all know it.Thank Jennifer. That is the point I was trying to make, especially the: WE JUST DON'T ALL KNOW IT. I think I have the wrong idea about my own significance. Getting that wrong robs me, (robs us all) of living with a sense of self-worth. If you don't value yourself it threats us all. Sometimes I think we don't love our neighbors as our selves because we hate ourselves. I so liked the way you put it. Thanks for reading.
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