On Insignificance

I believe in insignificance. Grand gestures full of resonance and import have their place in our world, but I speak of the small, insignificant acts which make us all so human. Years ago, I picked up the telephone every day at 3 p.m. from Europe to call my sister in California. She commuted to a hospital in a poor neighbourhood at that time, finishing her medical residency. “I can’t do it anymore!” she despaired. “You must. You’ve come too far,” I used to urge her. It took unsung strength to lift that receiver and take in her pain every single day for an entire year until she finished her residency. I never told her so.

My sister became an internist and now develops diabetes programs for Spanish-speaking migrant workers in the Central Valley. I occasionally translate speeches for her. And I have worked as an English teacher in Europe for twelve years now, far away from my sister and all I left behind in America. I often feel bereft here. I go shopping in German markets and feel loss as I pick out strange vegetables or pick out food cans with unbelievably long names. I watch the sidewalk in front of me as I walk down the streets, feeling so alone. Not lonely, just alone. I note the deepening furrow between my eyebrows, the sudden white hairs on my head, and the drooping of my cheeks. I look for the young woman I once was in New York City, pushing my firstborn’s stroller up and down midtown streets. I have become middle-aged! And yet, I spend more time thinking about my children and caring for their needs than I actually do talking with them or playing with them. I always feel torn between them and my work projects. But they are always in me, in a way I think that they are not in my good husband. The one anonymous act I hold most dear in life consists of thwarting generational cycles of domestic violence and alcoholism. I became a living shield for my sons.

I thought I would build a busier life, one full of significance and resonance for our world today, especially after receiving a doctorate from an Ivy League university in America. But I haven’t succeeded in any worldly way. And can I be happy being nobody? “I’m Nobody. Who are you?” wrote Emily Dickinson. Even so, I still attempt to leave a little scratch in this world with my writings–just these little etchings, renderings of my life’s experiences in short vignettes. It’s a wonderful thing to do, to write, to recreate lost worlds and in doing so to forgive myself. I am of no significance or perhaps really I am, because I live and breathe and think and do what I need to do in life and encourage people like my sister to do the same.