Relevance Revisited, or Continuing Studies in Relevance

I know I covered the topic of relevance at great length in 2008 and 2009, but it is still a topic that holds near and dear to my heart, and it is a topic that I feel can be visited once again.

In my life (in the last decade at least), I haven’t given much thought or care whether I was liked or disliked. I haven’t cared whether I was admired or revered. I honestly haven’t even given much thought to how respected I am. I do, however, give thought to my relevance. Do people notice me, positively or negatively? Is what I’m doing important? Does it matter?

There’s a fairly new band that I happen to like named The Lumineers. In their song “Stubborn Love”, they sing “It’s better to feel pain than nothing at all/ The opposite of love’s indifference.” I really think they’re on to something.

I personally believe the worst words to hear are not “I hate you,” or “I wish I had never met you.” Those words, though drenched in malice, signify an emotional response between the speaker and the recipient. I have long believed that anyone who is capable of loving someone is equally as capable of hating a person, and vice versa. The emotions of love and hate are opposite sides of the same coin. They are very different, but are related. No, I believe that the worst words to hear are “Who are you again?” or “You don’t matter to me” or “You’ve never mattered to me.” Those statements, even when free of malice, are cold and detached. Nobody wants to feel irrelevant or superfluous.

As I have stated on a number of occasions, most notably in my Apologia, I was part of two youth groups during my teen years. One of those youth groups I left in 2003 because I never felt like I belonged. When I look back on my time spent there, I have come to realize that there were only a small handful of times where I was actually treated badly. What was the case, though, was that I don’t think it mattered much to most people whether I was around or not. I was just around. I wasn’t well-liked, but I wasn’t hated either. I was just there. I wasn’t relevant, and I think that’s what ate at me the most.

The older I have gotten, I have been able to conquer a number of my fears and do things my younger self would have thought improbable, if not impossible. One of my greatest fears (whether real or imagined), is that one day I will come to the realization that I was far less important (both small-scale and in the grand scheme of things) than I thought I was, that others mattered to me far more than I mattered to them.

So is there a key to staying relevant, to making a difference in people’s lives, to matter as much to others as they matter to you? If there is, I have not yet found it. All I know that I can do is to live with a purpose and do purposeful things. Even if you can not maintain personal relevance, the actions you make can last long after you have gone. You cannot make someone positively care about you, but you can do a lot of positive things for a lot of people. And really, that’s what matters.