How to be OK with it, Part I

I think the first step is realizing that you're nothing special.

Shortly after my mom died, I found myself in Barcelona. There is a thousand-year-old cathedral in the old city. The cathedral itself is built on part of the old roman wall. At one time that old city was new. If you walk along the north wall of the cathedral, you can touch cuts in the stone laying at about waist level. Those grooves in the wall, according to locals I spoke with, were created over many years by roman sentinels sharpening their swords. When you place your hand in the grooves, the stone feels cool and smooth. You can stand in front of the cathedral on the same stones that millions of people, mostly long gone and forgotten and, likely as not, unremarked upon in life have walked.

There, in the center of an old city shortly after my mother's passing, I was first struck by the enormity of humanity and the insignificance of the single life.

There is no shame in being one of the nameless and faceless millions who pass through this world quietly. For every Churchill and Shakespeare there are hundreds of lesser known leaders and poets whose memories fade quietly and for each of those there are thousands more whose abilities to organize men and create verse are never noted at all.

I am not suggesting that these lives don't matter. Each of us contributes to the crush and clamor of life at minimum through contact - just like the bouncing electrons we learn about in high school physics. Perhaps, through our everyday efforts we make the world a better place in some George-Bailey-ish kind of way, doing good that produces good. But there is no harm in being unknown and forgotten. Even George Bailey was unknown outside of Bedford Falls.