What Matters Most is Mattering

This summer, I wrote about the importance of having more meaningful conversations and suggested four questions to stimulate that result: What moment changed your life? What do you understand now that you didn’t understand at 40? How would you like to be remembered? What turned out to matter most?

I thought those were questions primarily about looking back. Lately, however, several responses have caused me to wonder whether they may be pointing us forward.

Maybe figuring out what matters is only half the job. The other half is finding ways to still matter.

That may become an especially interesting question as we grow older.

For much of our lives, there were ready-made ways of telling ourselves that we mattered. Someone needed us at work. Children depended upon us. Deadlines awaited us. People called with problems that were somehow ours to solve. There were promotions to pursue, organizations to lead, bills to pay and places we were expected to be on Monday morning.

Then life changed. We retired. Our children built lives of their own. Someone else occupies our old office. The telephone may not ring quite as often with people asking for our judgment.

None of that means we matter less. But it may mean that mattering is no longer assigned to us. We have to choose to matter.

I believe that is one of the great opportunities of this stage of life. We have something now that we could not possibly have possessed when we were 30 or 40: decades of experience. We have made good decisions and spectacularly bad ones. We have loved people and lost people. We have succeeded at things we once thought impossible, and failed at things we thought would be easy. We have changed our minds. We have survived disappointments that once seemed unbearable. Surely, all of that ought to be good for something.

I’m realizing that experience stored away is not necessarily wisdom. It becomes valuable when we do something with it.

That “something” need not be grand. We matter when we call someone who is lonely. We matter when we listen long enough for another person to tell us what is really troubling them. We matter when we help a younger person avoid a mistake we once made or, perhaps better, give them the freedom to make a mistake of their own.

We matter when we repair an old friendship, reconnect with someone we have lost along the way, welcome a new neighbor, volunteer for something worthwhile, speak up about something we believe needs changing, or simply make another person’s day a little easier.

Sometimes, mattering may consist mostly of letting someone else know that they matter.

There is an important distinction here. Mattering is not the same as being important. Most of us have probably known people who confused the two. Being important is about recognition. Mattering is about contribution.

Being important asks, “Do people know who I am?” Mattering asks, “Is something, or perhaps someone, better because I was here?” I find the second question more interesting.

There is a lovely paradox to growing older. At precisely the time when the world may seem to expect less from us, we may finally possess more of what the world actually needs from us: perspective, patience, experience, stories, judgment, and perhaps a little humility about how often we have been wrong. We also have a greater appreciation of the time that remains in our lives.

Which raises another question. What do we want to do with the time that remains?

There are people living right now who can be affected by whether we choose to engage with them or withdraw from them. There are problems in our community and our world to which we can still contribute. My grandson helps to remind me that there are younger generations who may benefit from something we have learned, and from our willingness to listen to what they have learned as well. There also are conversations we still need to have with aging loved ones, such as a sibling or old friend, while we still can.

The four questions I recently posed invite us to examine the lives we have lived. But perhaps the most important question comes next: What are we going to do with what we have learned?

Rossmoor has many opportunities for exercise and play, and that is fabulous. But it also has many clubs whose mission is to make a difference. And many residents who could use a little help.

We may have fewer years ahead of us than behind us, but that does not mean those years have to matter less. Perhaps the opposite is true.

After spending a lifetime discovering what matters, we finally have the opportunity, and perhaps even the responsibility, to do something about it.

Because in the end, maybe what matters most is mattering.

Bill Leary can be emailed at leary.bill@yahoo. com