Looking out from your apartment window and into a blackened nighttime sky, you see a towering skyscraper, clad with tiny rectangular windows of its own that remain steady, yellow boxes of light. You admire each entity, knowing that within each glass shape is a room and within that space is at least one individual and each of those people has a narrative of their own lifetime. You admire the boxes of light and wonder if they can see the orange glow from your own window. You ponder that perhaps these individuals are thinking about the person within your light box room (you) and in that split second, the night sky does not seem so dark. You sit there by your window the rest of the evening, watching each individual block of space on that high rise building flicker off, a simple goodnight to each stranger, until the building turns black and the sky turns blacker between you and that not-so-far-off tower. Each of those lights had seemed so small, but now that the city scene beheld in front of you is completely dark in the glory of the night, you know that every bright yellow box had mattered, each one counted, each was fully necessary in the illumination of the sky, contributions of constellations in a previously blank galaxy.
Recognizing significance in our lives and in the lives of others is the key to acknowledging purpose. It is all too easy to walk through each day of ours looking at the sidewalk in fear of connecting and looking at those passing us on the street as mere pedestrians. It is too simple to live without regard to the fact that everyone around us is living a life as complex as our own. We must recognize fully that our lives, and the lives of others, are highly significant. Our actions and words and hopes and dreams matter. We are not just floating around on a rock in the vastness of the universe; we are living. We are reasoning and attaching meaning to our lives constantly, simply by acting and making choices. Even existentialists, who thrive on the notion that there is no inherent meaning, seek out the cultivation of their own authentic meaning. This is a beautiful thing, in and of itself, to be able to recognize that even in times when life appears meaningless, we have the ability to make it more in the sense of what is important to us.
We have so much power over our own situations and so much potential to cultivate goodness. We have every chance to accept the entrance of situations and people in our lives as commonplace, happenstance, "just what happened," but in that mindset, we fail to recognize that the humanity in our lives and the events of our days have an impact on who we are. Perhaps the coffee shop barista that you held the door open for will make a great cup of coffee for another customer. Perhaps that customer will go on to have a great day and be especially kind to those around them in their workplace. Perhaps that inspires someone around them to work harder than they wanted to initially that day and they could get a raise based upon their newfound work ethic. The cycle goes on.
By being aware of the impact that others have on our lives and the impact we have on others' lives, we can be fully accustomed to the idea of significance. You did not simply walk past that person on the street; you experienced them. In that present moment, you shared space with them. You smiled at them, and they smiled back. You were there. Maybe the reason you met them was as simple as that, but even this matters. The people we come across and the sentences of time we share with ourselves and the individuals around us are significant, even when nothing seemingly important is said or done. We are constantly allowing input into our bodies to be interpreted and this is how memories are formed, this is how your brain waves and emotional connections are formed, this is how you are formed. Our experiences are the workout of our souls in the same way that muscle memory is created in constant action, growth and learning. We, so often, are guided to see what happens to us in our lives as good or bad based upon the outcome's alignment with our personal expectation or what we think we needed for ourselves at that time. Perhaps our experiences are neither good nor bad, but simply perpendicular lines that slash into the timeline of our years on earth and declare the sacred "I am alive." Perhaps who we meet and how we live—marked by the faces and places that trace into our individual perspectives—are simply issuing a reminder of what it means to be living, what it means to be existing, what it means to be human.
The importance of recognizing significance does not falter at a stop sign that begs to acknowledge that you were simply born when you were or that you happened to be in the same coffee shop at the same time as the guy you started dating shortly after meeting there. The importance of significance, while including these—amongst countless other—concepts, is that our lives are designed with an empty blueprint. We are given our blue sheets of paper, and over our lifetimes we begin to draw the structures of our beings in a conditioning of what happens to us, what we happen to do to our individual lives, who we meet in the meantime, and what moments we live through that deeply resonate with us and make us feel truly alive, truly expansive and truly ourselves in the capacity we were meant to be as such. The importance of recognizing significance means that you can view these ideas not simply within yourself, but in the lives of all of those around you, realizing the complexities within us all. We are all walking, growing, breathing, heart-beating yellow lights in a skyscraper that illuminates the sky. Allowing ourselves to see that each glowing rectangle of space—with all of its stories of the past and radiant illustrations of the present and beaming potentials of the future—is important in the singular unifying brightness of the dark nighttime atmospheric haze will create a platform that will cultivate lives within each of us that fully honors the places we are bound to go and the people we are destined to connect with in the meantime. Becoming a part of this gratitude-bound system of significance allows for experiences worth experiencing, meaning worth noticing and life worth living.
