I can do nothing for you but work on myself. You can do nothing for me but work on yourself.
-Ram Dass
I’ve just returned from a long weekend away visiting family. We went to the place my mother grew up, and where my parents met. It’s where my 97-year-old grandfather lives, and aunts and uncles, and cousins, and cousins’ kids, and cousins of cousins, and ghosts of all the people who once dwelt there.
My Gram died last summer, and left a gaping hole. Most especially for Gramp. But if there was anything Gram excelled at (and there were many things) it was keeping a record of life—of lives. She wrote stacks of slim books on her own memories; on her family history; on the remembrances of others. She organized genealogies. She put together histories never before compiled. She made album after album of photos, cards, newspaper clippings, paraphernalia of all sorts. Among other talents, for years she helped kids learn to read, which is not a gift soon forgotten.
In other words: she burned bright while she was with us.
As we drove across central New York, passing through towns both substantial and hardly-there, I couldn’t help but think (as I always do—as I always wonder): but who ARE all these people? How did they get here? What do they do? What are their lives? What are their loves?
It seems fitting that last night I came across the phrase “unrecorded lives” in the novel I’m reading, and that feels just right to describe these many humans, living in these many towns dotting the state, dotting the country, dotting the world.
All the unrecorded lives we breeze by unknowingly throughout our days. All the unrecorded lives we’ll never see; never know.
And I think, perhaps, it’s this fear of being unrecorded that keeps so many of us glued to our phones. It’s what keeps people striving toward celebrity status of one kind or another. It’s what keeps people fumbling toward significance, in a thousand directions. Directions sometimes admirable, sometimes dismal.
The terror of passing through life and barely making a mark strikes the fear of God in us. And so we scritch-scratch our way to something we deem meaningful. Whether by preserving every mediated minute of our lives on social media; or idolizing money, politics, politicians, sports trophies; or endlessly climbing towards the next big thing, or imprinting ourselves on younger people, or serving the poor, or praying, or hoarding treasure, or collecting junk, or making art, or scribbling words, or going to Mars, or bulldozing over other peoples’ lives, or leaving mean messages on the internet, or being kind to the grocery clerk, or learning gentleness for our children, or seeking tenderness for our own transformation…we all have our ways.
I guess what I’m trying to say is—no one wants to waft through the world unnoticed, unrecorded; ashes to ashes with no hot flame in-between.
We want to burn something. We want to burn for something.