My newest muse is a woman I’ve never met. I’ll call her Heather, because that’s her name. I don’t know precisely where she lives, or at all what she looks like, but I’ve been reading her words for a while now. I don’t even remember precisely when I met her. But I am glad I did.
Heather wrote recently and what she said has arrested me so completely. Her thesis?
I wasn’t made for big things.
Heather
Heather explains that while our current western, capitalistic society is shouting that we should live loud, out-there lives on social media, and sell ourselves and everything else as side hustles, she feels drawn in the opposite direction: towards a small, quiet, un-sold life. I resonate with that so hard I feel I might vibrate apart.
Time and time again I’ve been wrongly convinced that any strengths, thoughts, or feelings of mine (any of ours) are to be packaged, marketed, and sold to the masses. That if my own ideology isn’t going to be picked up, it’s not worth putting down. That if too few people “like” what I create it’s to be immediately archived to save face. That if I have a specific skill or trait that makes me stand out among the crowd it is my unending duty to brand it, niche it, box myself into it for monetization’s sake. Otherwise, without a what’s next what’s the point of a what’s now?
Heather
I’ve battled my whole life to feel relevant. Probably leftover feelings of inadequacy in the face of being born third, or simply a constant imbibing of a message of “matter or don’t matter!” that’s been shoved down my brain ever since I could consume media. Either way, I haven’t found what “I am here to do…” and it has been quietly driving me to the mental hospital in an antiseptically white van.
I don’t want to showcase that I’ve been here. I don’t want it recorded that my mark has been made here. I simply want to show up, exist, and let any lasting effect ripple with time, completely unbeknownst to me. I want to sit with someone I just met and invite conversations that are never meant to be shared beyond the sacred moment we have them… I want to visit desolate, unhurried places and leave footsteps in the wildgrass without pictures to prove it.
Heather
I feel this in my bones. I love taking pictures, recording moments, and capturing time on a stretched canvas, but I’ve also had the thought many, many times to just enjoy a moment unrecorded. “This one is for me.” I’ll murmur, and not pull out my camera to trap it in a 4×5 frame forever. I’ll let that moment breathe, and be, and then scamper away to join its mates in the backward running stream of time to be lost forever, to be regained only in memory ever after.
I want to be the slow bob of a wave at deep sea, holding close and passing on the songs of a humpback whale and the electricity of a box jelly. I want to be infused with every touch of life, instead of grasping desperately for its hand in dance.
In my heart of hearts, I think I was meant to live quietly. Simply. Small, even, in a lot of ways. To love what I do, to love who I do, to store it in the safekeeping of memory and story…
Heather
This. So much this.
I have dreams and aspirations, of course, but they are meant to service me, and not the other way ’round. If I end up doing something noteworthy I almost want it to be by accident; I want to do it along the way of just enjoying what it is to be me, wholly me, and no-one else. Be that being a professor, or a writer, or artist, or whatever, it must be in the flow of Phil-ness and not because it is What I Was Meant To Do. I don’t know that I even believe in Destiny or Purpose or whatevers.
I believe that great ones are great because of how they treat those around them, and not for anything they Do. That every someone who ever had a statue made of them was some sort of scoundrel or other and that the truly noteworthy never really get wrote about. I am not sure I even want to be remembered for any “accomplishment” of mine, but for who I was to my wife, my nieces, my sister, my parents, and those I am privileged to know in this life.
May they remember me as I am: a flawed, simple man, trying to find my way in the universe. That will be enough for me.
Thank you, Heather.
a simple man 