As a reflective person, I tend to ponder things and one of life's little mysteries is what does matter in life. This is obviously a rhetorical question about life, but I think what really does matter is how you treat people.... especially those that you love. I like to read and used to read a fair amount before coming here. A passage that really resonated with me was from "The Secret Life of Bees" by Sue Monk Kidd.
“There’s one thing I don’t get,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“How come if your favorite color is blue, you painted your house so pink?”
She laughed. “That was May’s doing. She was with me the day I went to the paint store to pick out the color. I had a nice tan color in mind, but May latched on to this sample called Caribbean Pink. She said it made her feel like dancing a Spanish flamenco. I thought, ‘Well, this is the tackiest color I’ve ever seen, and we’ll have half the town talking about us, but if it can lift May’s heart like that, I guess she ought to live inside it.’”
“All this time I just figured you liked pink,” I said.
She laughed again. “You know, some things don’t matter that much, Lily. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person’s heart — now, that matters. The whole problem with people is –”
“They don’t know what matters and what doesn’t,” I said, filling in her sentence and feeling proud of myself for doing so.
“I was gonna say, The problem is they know what matters, but they don’t choose it. You know how hard that is, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.”
So the question that arises for me is how hard is it to really make other people happy? Is it really that hard to think of other people when making decisions? Not that you have to do things solely for other people and not let your needs be known, but I feel that most people think that life is about making sure that their needs are met first and foremost.
And the majority of people that would decide that it was okay to paint their house Caribbean Pink for someone else would make sure that was never forgotten. August decided to paint her house for her sister... but I can guarantee that five years from now if they got into a fight she wouldn't say "Well, you are ungrateful because I painted by house Caribbean Pink for you."
I just do love this passage because it does bring to light two important things. 1. What matters in life is treating other people well and 2. Good deeds should be done not for collateral or recognition but out of love.
