How giving helps us matter

If there’s any advice that’s repeated the most when you’re young, it has to be the simple phrase, “Life is short.“  At that stage in your life, it’s a ridiculous statement, since life is just beginning.  Even when you’re in your 30s and 40s, it makes intuitive sense – you can respect it – but it lacks the bite to have any real application.

We’re often told that the best response to “life is short” is to “enjoy the journey.” Again, this makes intuitive sense, but becomes more problematic in practice.  Like a TV ticker that never ends, our brains are spinning on problems – and thinking ahead to things that need to be done – even during rare relaxing moments.  We’re experts at keeping busy, and when we happen to find a couple minutes of downtime, we whip out our phones and distract ourselves.  Hours race by like tweets, drowned by an endless to-do list.  Suddenly we realize ten years have gone by, and time is only accelerating.

I’ve found the only anecdote is two weeks vacation taken at once (which I never take) or a deep sleep.  Carving out meaningful time with the kids – and putting down the phone when we do (other than snapping the occasional Instagram pic) – certainly is a big step in the right direction.

However, I think there’s another big piece of this.  “I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter,” writes Tim Kreider in “The Busy Trap,” an insightful look at America’s fascination with keeping insanely busy. Oprah puts it another way, “Everybody wants to know that they matter.”

Yes, I just quoted Oprah, but I think these are remarkable statements.  If you believe what you’re doing really matters – and by extension, that you matter – then it adds purpose to the journey.  That helps focus your tasks, reducing points of distraction.  It also reduces the likelihood that we’ll all look back years later and question how we invested our precious time during our best and brightest years.

This doesn’t mean you have to find your “true calling in life,” as that’s often illusive and a bit of a Hollywood fantasy, if you ask me.  But I have a theory: the act of helping others – by giving time, expertise or money – helps us matter more, especially when we give in concert with a community.  When we see the results of our gifts, we feel we’ve made an imprint on the world. 

The trick is finding the time to give, and that is the paradox.  Like carving out time for the kids, you need to fight off the distractions and find the time.  Once you get rolling, it will come naturally.