Significance

Significance

by Peter Shikli
8 February 2002

From atop Cloud's Rest, Yosemite Valley is a tiny faraway place. One looks down even at mighty Half Dome rising as a monument to glacial defiance. Huddled against granite, one can defend against wind and acrophobia, but not against a feeling of insignificance. An endless sea of peaks and crags, some higher than Cloud's Rest, leaves one a speck of dust in the kingdom of the Earth. Whether we measure ourselves against any of those mountains by space or time, the greatest one of us is but a pine needle in the forest.

A concert at the Hollywood Bowl or the four-level Hollywood Interchange in LA, endless humanity crushing at the seams. Surely there are many among them faster, smarter, richer, and more successful than me. Most of us will not be a footnote in even a local history book. And then there is the remaining 7 billion of us, and counting. How can any of us achieve significance in a competition against so many of our equals? How can a blade of grass stand out in the Great Plains?

And then there is the night sky. A billion galaxies, each with a billion stars, immeasurably diluting whatever shred of significance we could aspire to on this planet. How can we expect to present ourself to God upon our death and say what we accomplished, to speak of anything that had not been heard before, to say our name with a superlative of any consequence?

Religions say we will be measured by our goodness. Problem: most people are good. We tell of our bad experiences only because they are the exceptions to the rule. To mention that we were kind to someone we met today is unlikely to get much of a rise. Newspapers are full of mayhem because reporting that most people were noble in their daily activities would be like reporting that the ground was still under our feet. A bumper sticker encourages us to practice random acts of kindness, but we live in a world organized for acts of kindness. Not just in America, it is growing impossible to starve without a great deal of advanced planning — one mistake and someone will find you and feed you.

And then there are our loved ones, Mother Teresa, and our heroes. No matter how vaguely religions define goodness, we can't really expect to excel at it given how the world has so many good people. Not a surprising outcome if we were created in God's likeness, but then we're back to insignificance compared to our peers.

The outlook continues bleak as long as we put the yardstick to ourselves as individuals. The only alternative is to define ourselves differently so we score better, in particular, to join a team that scores well. We can become the select group of just a few thousand who have climbed Cloud's Rest in their 50's. We can be members of the community that built the Hollywood Bowl and the Hollywood Interchange. We may be citizens of a great democracy. We belong to the great club of living creatures who seek meaning. By thus expanding our membership, we can achieve whatever impressive significance we desire. Back to my bumper sticker, "It's not who you are but what you're part of."

The catch, however, is that membership requires a contribution. We have to do something in order to claim legitimate membership in a group that is significant. Membership based on nothing but chance usually yields a group that has no real claim to significance. To be a member of a group with black skin is trivial. To be a member of a group that overcame slavery is significant — but that requires a contribution, something one did to help overcome slavery. It need not be a flashy armed revolt, it can be the often harder task of maintaining dignity amid generations of oppression. The contribution simply needs to be measurable, and then we're in.

To be significant, we no longer need to exceed others, but we do need to make a significant contribution to our group. Now our life task is just to contribute value to a worthwhile group in some measurable way — somewhat more possible than the earlier approach to significance.

If God is the ultimate measurer, what can be measured? He does have billions of people to measure, and multiplied by unimaginable space and time. In my field, managing databases with millions of records is not a big deal, ie. measuring and tracking millions of people. The Social Security Administration can keep track of 300 million Americans, and the leading edge databases have a trillion records. Each of our bodies has 4 trillion cells, and our brains, or their delegated organs, measure those 4 trillion contributions rather well. One can assume God can do that and more.

In previous rantings, I defended the idea that our souls are the persistent records in this important database to measure our significance, our contributions to the groups we belonged to. When we love, do good, inspire peace, or otherwise contribute, the fields in our spiritual record are updated. When the Great Measurer gets a summary report about us, it will be based on what groups were significant and then which individuals were contributors. The difference can be analogous to our soccer team winning the Olympics rather than the individual who kicked furthest. Everyone on the soccer team gets the same gold medal, star kicker to substitute goalie. The substitute goalie justifiably feels significant because he delivered some measurable contribution to the team.

We often don't get to choose which team we're in. We may not be picked for the Olympics. We may instead have the honor to be a black slave, and to distinguish ourselves on that team. The only certainty is that we will belong to some significant groups by chance and others by choice. Our final significance report will be the sum of the significance of all the groups to which we truly belonged. These complex, overlapping memberships make for unclear measurements to judge significance. No longer are we measured by any one superlative, and we may achieve significance if on our deathbed we can repeat one of my dad's last words, "I did what I came to do." We paid our dues to join a group, and then we contributed in some measurable way to their significance. And then we did this as often and as well as life permitted.

Curiously, our reward in many religions for such a performance is to gain admission to yet another group some call heaven or God, to be reunited into a being where concepts of one or many are not as clear as on Earth. Therein may lie the greatest significance to which we can aspire, that we may even now be fledgling members of a wannabe group called God.

As kids, we were told we were members of the Body of Christ. The concept was largely lost on teenagers, and we dissolved into irreverent chortling about which part of the body our sidekicks were. Curiously, the analogy may hold accurate if each human is a cell in a body known 2000 years later to contain about as many cells as this world may contain humans. Perhaps our contribution is to play our part as a cell does to produce this marvel of our biology. Our significance is our membership in the God Team, and we don't gain it individually any more than a bone cell is more significant than a kidney cell. In fact, efforts to exceed our peers may sometimes feed our egos and divert us from the mission of our group. When cells do that, they become significant by being cancerous.

The richest man in the world may have as much difficulty entering heaven as a camel passing the eye of a needle because the diversion from being a team member is so strong. Achieving some measure of individual superlative then becomes a way to reduce our chances of achieving true significance. We appear to leave the pack behind, to stand out, but to fall back to the hopeless situation of trying to measure ourselves alone. We expire on a treadmill we can never turn fast enough.

Better is a father at a baseball game, watching his kid play, knowing he is like all the other fathers and sons at all the other baseball games. He realizes he has paid the price of admission to a significant group of humans who grow and inspire children. He doesn't strive to be the best possible father producing the best possible kid, just a good father producing a good kid. Significance is measured by every member of this group on Fathers Day and on their deathbeds.

More ramblings like this: www.shikli.com/blog

Peter Shikli is CEO of Bizware Online Applications. You can view his bio and contact him at pshikli@bizware.com.