What Matters...

 “…what makes you different from me is the difference in our cares. You are, quite literally, defined by the things you care about.” (How People Learn)

Our cares determine what we see, what we process, what we remember – and who we become.

If you are white, racial equality may be something you care about; you may even think about it every day, but it will never matter in the same way as if you were black. You don’t feel it every day, every time you walk into a room of white faces.

You may feel other things: how it feels to be working class, how it feels to be a woman, how it feels to be depressed – and there will be people around you for whom these things matter, too – even if they don’t feel them.

Most weekends I mow the lawn. I like to mow the grass in neat, straight lines. This matters to me, and I find myself thinking ‘have I become an annoying git?’. The answer is ‘it depends’. If you are the kind of person who, in the midst of all the chaos, gets some satisfaction from a patch of garden – then you might think I am tolerable.

This is how your relationship works (assuming you have one). Some of the stuff you do, also matters to your partner – and some of the stuff doesn’t. Hopefully there is enough of an overlap in your cares for them to overlook your annoying stuff – or maybe you grow together.

And I guess this is how the two of you met: something you both cared about, something that mattered to you both. Something you experienced together.

Human beings are unusual this way: sometime in the last few thousand years we decided not just to group around genetic relationships but around relationships of care: we form groups around things that matter to us: football supporters, church-goers, scientists…

And we developed a special technique for coming together – for aligning our cares: conversation. Conversation holds your relationship together; conversation brings us together as a group. 

Conversation matters.