Don't Worry, It's Not Important
👏🏻 Congratulations, you didn't do it.
How do we know what's important?
When we picked out our last house, we looked at the chandelier over the stairs and said "That's what we'll change first." That was in 2012, 9 years before we would move out of that house without looking at one(1) chandelier on Amazon. We moved away from Florida and returned to the northeast where I grew up. As we were driving from house to house with the realtor, I mentioned how excited I was to be able to play pond hockey again like I had when I was a kid. Without a hint of hesitation, she said, "Oh the ponds don't freeze here, so there won't be any hockey." Something I considered a key part of my new life up north was shattered. I believed it was important to me, but today is the first time I've thought about it since she said it. As it turns out, it wasn't important at all.
I think we can sum up our lives as a grand charade of pretending things are important. This is normal. And it's fine. We don't know we're pretending until reality and our behavior hand us the receipts. If we pay attention we can hone our ability to imagine how things might play out and our barometer for what matters gets more accurate. The only problem is other people will forever be in various stages of this process, and trying to convince someone that something they think is important isn't is a dangerous game. Another pitfall, though I've never encountered this one, is the possibility that you neglect something of profound import, like remembering your wife's birthday or getting that colonoscopy. If that happens, though, I suspect more is wrong with you than the inability to understand the meaning of the word necessary.
Back when I started high school, my interest in drawing accelerated. As I learned how to draw faces, a series of synapses in my brain went rogue and I became obsessed with female noses. I was always worried I'd meet the perfect girl (none exist) but she would have the wrong nose, whatever that meant, and I would have to choose between loneliness or giving up on my dream of dating the nostril queen of New Jersey (also not a thing). These are the ravings of someone with zero grasp on the real world and the matters of true significance within. I learned over time that having a certain nose would be the least of my concerns in a relationship. For starters, having a pulse became more than enough after I learned girls don't simply knock on your door and introduce themselves twice a week. And for the record, my wife's nose is beautiful, but it wasn't even on the list of criteria when we started dating. The true important traits like "would make a good mother" and "laughs at my dumb jokes" rose to the top of the leaderboard where they remain.
Time and age have a habit of elbowing the unimportant things from our lives out of sheer necessity. Part of this is a change in priorities, but other times it's because we haven't looked critically at separating wants from needs. Remembering the times we didn't get what we needed can be a good reminder that we sometimes wrap ourselves into knots over nothing.
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