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In his book Freedom Evolves, the philosopher Daniel Dennett tells about a young father who forgot to drop off his infant daughter at her day-care center on his way to work. She spent the day locked in his car in a hot parking lot. When he returned to his car, she was still strapped into her little car seat in the back seat, dead.
Dennett goes on to say that he knows nothing more about this young father. While it is conceivable that he is a callous human being who deserves to be despised, Dennett says, it is also conceivable that he is basically a good person, a victim of cosmically bad luck. For Dennett, who describes himself as notoriously absentminded, the unsettling question is: could I ever do anything like that?
He says, “I replay the scene with many variations, imagining distractions—a fire engine racing by just as I am about to turn off to the day-care center, something on the radio reminding me of a problem I have to solve that day.... Could such a series of distracters pile up and bury my overriding project of getting my daughter safely to day care? …I am thankful that nothing like this has yet confronted me, because I do not know that there are no circumstances in which I could do what this young man did. Such things happen all the time.”
Indeed, they do. Occasionally, something that appears not to matter at all turns out to matter hugely. The challenge, presumably, is to try to identify these moments before they happen. But the problem is that we can almost never do that.
Instead, perhaps we should take a different lesson from the story: everything matters, even small things. Maybe we err when we assume that when consequences are not close at hand or dramatic, there are none.
For example, when an airliner crashes and a hundred or more people die, we respond with anguish at such a significant loss of life. When someone dies in an auto accident, no one except friends and family of the victim pays much attention. Yet more than forty thousand people a year die in car crashes—roughly the equivalent of two jumbo jets going down every week. Imagine our response if that happened. Because auto deaths are dispersed by time and geography, they do not appear to matter as much. But to those who are directly affected, every death matters equally.
The same principle holds in the rest of life. All of our actions have consequences that are substantial and enduring. Most of the time, either because the consequences are distant from us, or because they are combined with the consequences of lots of other people’s actions, we do not see them up close, in sharp relief. But once in a while, something happens that reminds us that everything we do matters, without exception. It may not matter to us, or here, or now, but it matters.
The question is how we view our relationship to the stream of events that make up our lives. Do we see ourselves mostly as bystanders, capriciously rewarded or defeated by events over which we have little control? Or do we acknowledge that we have some active role to play?
I recall an article published some time ago in the New Yorker titled “Jumpers.” It’s about people who commit suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The article describes an interview with Jerome Motto, a now-retired psychiatrist who had been part of two failed efforts to have suicide barriers constructed on the bridge. Motto had two patients who committed suicide from the bridge, and it was the second death that most affected him. Motto said, “I went to this guy’s apartment afterward with the assistant medical examiner. The guy was in his thirties, lived alone, pretty bare apartment. He’d written a note and left it on his bureau. It said, ‘I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.’”
For the want of a smile, a life was lost. None of the people who met that young man as he walked to the bridge had any idea of what was at stake. This is true for most of us, most of the time. We do not know what is at stake. For the most part, we never will.
Nonetheless, as the story illustrates, everything we do matters. No matter how inconsequential our everyday actions may be to us, they matter to someone, somewhere, somehow. It matters whether we smile, or buy this product, or support that policy. It matters whether we agree, or disagree, or call, or write, or help, or hope, or love, or forgive. Everything matters.
Near the end of his life, the pacifist German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who famously participated in a plot to assassinate Hitler and was eventually executed for his complicity, put it this way: “There remains for us only the very narrow way, often extremely difficult to find, of living every day as if it were our last, and yet living in faith and responsibility as though there were to be a great future.”
