importance

the daughter of a friend asked "what is the least important thing in your life?" I do not think I have had a harder question in recent memory. All sorts of glib answers of course spring forth: laundry, bills, plastic, socks. But when one starts to really chase down all of the ways that each of these things ripples through one's life, it becomes impossible to find anything that is actually unimportant.

Everything is so connected that to tease one thread out of my life to say "this I do not need, this thing is unimportant" is a massively daunting task, when I approach it thoughtfully. The easy target for me, of course, is plastic. But then, many of the things that made K better when she had those complications around giving birth were made of plastic. The rain barrel I am getting on Wednesday is plastic. My bike helmet is plastic. Much of this computer is plastic. So obviously it is not that.

I wanted to be glib and say underwear, but in truth Syracuse would be a pretty uncomfortable place for six months of the year without long underwear, I am pretty sure. Same for socks. I would like to say the television, but there are TV shows that I watch that I love, and that lend a rhythm and cadence to my life that are not unimportant, and there are movies that I watch repeatedly that are very important to me. I wish I could say my car was unimportant, but I need to move things from place to place frequently, and often those things are my son, and I do not think putting him on my bike in February would be wise. Or fun. So the car is not unimportant.

Every time I came up with something I realised I could not, in good conscience call any of them unimportant. I try to be thoughtful about the things in my life, and even though there are a LOT of things, they all seem to have a weight or an resonance that render them important.

What a wise question from a young person. Obviously this bears more thought, and a clearer definition of "unimportant."