Why What You Do Matters
The sky last night (with no filter) was sort of this wild Frederic Edwin Church colors, which one of our town councilors noticed and posted about on Facebook. The sunset did not last. I rushed outside and took a shot of it about the rooftops of downtown Bar Harbor, Maine, and then I just took it in.
That councilor’s post made me think a bit about Church, who was a Hudson River School landscape painter back in the 1800s. Church would often unveil a painting in exhibitions of just one painting. Sort of a big tah-dah moment!
I kind of like that.
The sky does that, too.
Church was devoted to details and big landscapes. His work went out of favor as he came closer to death. Then, it improved again. People were awed by his paintings again a half century after his death and beyond.
Nothing changed about his paintings in that time. What changed was people’s reactions to them, society’s reactions to them.
He couldn’t control those people’s reactions to his art. He could only make his art, create his own tah-dah moments and rejoice in them when they lasted.
There’s a well-known story about Saint Francis of Assisi. He liked to garden. He took care of his garden a lot. One day, the story goes, someone asked Francis while he was gardening what he’d do if he knew that the world was going to end that day.
He said he’d keep taking care of his garden. He’d plant the small seed. Water the plants. Take care of weeds. The fact that the world was about to potentially end? That didn’t matter. What mattered was the act of gardening.
What we do? Our small moments and acts? Those are the meaningful moments, the moments that make a difference even when we know the world might end soon.
Those small and meaningful acts add up in a life and they also add up in a home and in a family and in a community. Coaching, knitting, making music, sharing a funny story or a meal, bringing a book to a Little Free Library, building a playground, volunteering at a food bank, donating a cake to a race, planting a garden, rescuing an animal?
That’s what makes people strong. That’s what makes lives strong.
And the thing is that there’s probably something you’re doing right now that is meaningful like this. There is something you do that puts good into the world. People might not see it, just like they didn’t see Church’s paintings for a while, but that doesn’t lower its value. It doesn’t lower your own worth.
What’s important is that you see it, that you see the good that you do, the meaning you put into your life and into the world.
Sometimes, it’s good to stop for a second and think about what it is that you do that is meaningful. It can be tiny! It can be huge. But hold onto it, okay? Hold onto it and remember that you do good.
You do good.
You make meaning.
That matters and so do you.