My mother just returned from visiting her sister last weekend. In her bag were two carefully-packed tea mugs that belonged to my grandmother - one each for my sister and me. On her sojourns to visit her eldest daughter, my grandmother kept her own special cups from which an endless well of tea was consumed. The cups are simple: an ivory colour with a navy blue rim at the very top. No words, nothing fancy. Just simple tea cups for life that was full of upheaval, but simply lived.
I think a lot about what matters and how much lately. It must be the middle age in me, that delicate precipice where we’re halfway through the book and the plot continues to thicken. When I was younger everything mattered the whole world. I would upturn my life for things I barely remember now. My career has been defined by deadlines. While those must be met, how we get there has really been a lesson in mattering. I often advise my teams to “panic about the right things.” Everything simply doesn’t matter all the time. I’ve tried to adopt this in parenting, though that’s easier said than done - after all, decent human beings a hard to raise and that’s the bare minimum standard at the moment.
How much something matters to me is now becoming an exercise in proportion. With finite energy and time, we simply don’t have the capacity to care as deeply for the forgettable as we do for the things that will last. What is the composite of rituals, conversations, kinship and action that bring a life into colour? How does the value of a human life, a community figure in our own consciousness? These are the things I think about often.
I’m trying to be mindful these days of the shape and nature of my days. I’m trying not to hurry through a daycare drop off because I know my days of holding hands with a small human are numbered. I’m trying to say yes to one more book at bedtime. One more lunch break that isn’t at my desk so I can ask my spouse about his day.
The small blue-rimmed cup is safely tucked away in the back of the mug cabinet. I’m too scared to drink from it right now - it’s one of the few things I possess that belonged to my grandmother. It must have touched my grandmother’s lips hundreds of times. She didn’t change the world in some big way. She quietly raised a generation of children who raised another decent generation and who are now raising their own. Her legacy isn’t a name on a building. It lives in quiet memories of days where care and mattering went hand-in-hand. It is a gentle reminder that none of us outlast mortality and that much of what matters is in the small moments that we gather in our days and how we tend our own corner of the universe. One mug of tea at a time.