The power in knowing how little you matter.
“Knowing how little you matter is very important for your mental health and your happiness”
Like everyone, I’ve done a lot of stupid and embarassing things in my life. But for some reason one of the most irrelevant memories from my childhood ranks highest on the cringe-factor in my recollections.
I was 9 years old. Myself and the rest of my family were in Adelaide, Australia, living there for 6 months while my dad embarked on an academic sabbatical. All five of us had been invited over to friends of my parents for dinner. They served spaghetti bolognese. Being the leading favourite of mine, this was cause for much excitement. I loaded my plate high with spaghetti and bolognese, eagerly anticipating that carb-infused tomatoey goodness. The perfect finishing touch? Garlic bread, of course. I reached over, grabbed a couple of slices from the middle of the table, and turned to join the group in the next room. And as I did, I noticed my plate was empty. Barren. Devoid of food. Save for a trail of olive oil that led to the edge of my plate. And beyond its lip lay a horrifying truth. As I’d leaned over to grab those garlicky slices, my entire portion of food had slid from my plate, and onto the dining room’s white carpeted floor. Of course it was white.
So, I did the only reasonable thing a 9 year old could do in that situation. I encouraged the dog to come over and eat the evidence, not that it required much convincing. I willed that little pup to eat as quickly as ever a canine did eat, and not to miss a detail.
But poor little Fido had only managed a couple of hearty, slobbery mouthfuls when the hostess returned to the table to fetch more wine. And my cunning plan was foiled. Leaving my face as red as the stained spot beneath me.
In that moment, my whole world felt like it was about to implode from deep within me. The strength of that feeling was so vivid that remnants of it still stay within me. But fortunately they’re now followed by a hearty laugh. Because time, and maturity, brings perspective. And I wish I’d known more about the power of this all those years ago.
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
Almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
It is estimated that over the course of human history, approximately 109 billion people have died. And one day, you and I will become a very, very small part of a slightly larger number than that.
Thinking about death doesn’t have to represent fear, regret, anxiety - it can offer perspective. It serves to act as a reminder that we are just a tiny part of something unfathomably huge; the entirety of human existence. The galaxies that race away from us, the stars that extinguish above us, the billions of species that float through the waters that surround us: we exist as an infinitely small speck of everything that swirls around us today, that’s swirled before in history and that will swirl away from us in the millennia to come.
I’m sure you can easily think of your own version of BologneseGate. We’ve all been in a situation where we’ve said or done something that has left us feeling wholly horrified; frozen to the spot with embarrassment, or willing our feet to take flight from a room as a rising tide of humiliation rages within us. But we’ve also all experienced how those feelings fade over time. Even the deepest cuts heal; perhaps not always fully, but their pain reduces each and every day. And that is certainly true for embarassment, and all of our feelings.
Remembering that we are going to die - that in the future no one is going to really care about that ruined carpet - helps me to gain perspective of that pain more easily in the here and now. Some day in the future, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe in 50 years, you will be gone. You will be that tiny speck swirling in and among all the other infiniteness of the world. No one, absolutely no one, will be thinking about the time you spilled a whole plate of spaghetti bolognese on the carpet of a stranger’s house when you were 9 and tried to get the dog to eat it all before anyone noticed. In time, that moment will exist only in your mind. So why live in worry today?
You can only control what lies ahead of you, not behind.
More than 2,000 years ago, a bunch of Greek and Roman lads founded the core ideas behind something Stoicism1. And one of the main objectives of this theory tried really hard to force us to pay careful attention to what we can and can’t control:
The single most important practice in Stoic philosophy is differentiating between what we can change and what we can’t. What we have influence over and what we do not.
In order to help them to live out this idea, the Stoics lived by a specific mantra that they reminded themselves of daily:
‘Memento Mori’: Remember you must die.
Remembering that we are all destined to die is liberating. It focuses our mind to carry out those actions that add meaning to our lives, and frees us from worrying about those that we should let go, that are now beyond our control.
It reminds us to be grateful for what we have today, and to stop wishing for what we think we might want tomorrow.
It gives us perspective of how small we ultimately are.
And that grants us freedom from judgement to take control of who we want to be.
And a reminder that golden retrievers make terrible accomplices.