Will It Matter in a Hundred Years?

“Life is 10% of what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.” ~ Charles R. Swindoll

“Lighten up, just enjoy life, smile more, laugh more, and don’t get so worked up about things.” ~ Kenneth Branagh

I had no ideas about what to write today so I asked for help from the writing muses and what kept coming to mind was something my father used to say when I would get upset about something trivial. “Will it matter in a hundred years?”

It invariably happened when I was younger, I’d get caught up in some silly drama and I’d chew on it and make it my mantra. Now I’m not so prone to getting upset. If I do it takes me a much shorter time to get a better perspective. From what I read on social media, there are plenty of people who have not learned that lesson yet.

Yesterday I was looking at Facebook and there was a discussion on the TCM (Turner Classic Movies) group about whether or not The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was shown on the station, was a classic movie. It’s amazing how heated these discussions can get over something I consider to be trivial.

Sometimes arguments happen and insults are traded over things that are not so trivial. But here’s what I think my father was trying to get me to see. Our emotions have vibrations. When we get upset and lash out in anger, those feelings don’t stop with the person we’re attacking. Oh, no. They are like ripples in the water. They keep spreading out bashing into other people and affecting them. Have you ever walked into a room where two people have been fighting? Most likely, even if you’re not highly sensitive, you can feel the tension.

Another point my father was trying to make was that I needed to pick my battles. Some situations need to be challenged because in a hundred years we want that situation to have changed for the better.

When something happens that gets us all riled up, we have to take a good look and decide if getting angry, or standing up for ourselves will make a lasting difference or is of no consequence at all.

I just read Earthsea: A Wizard of Earthsea the first in a series by Ursula Le Guin. (I’m giving you fair warning of a big spoiler here in case you haven’t read it yet.) In the book a young wizard, trying to impress a rival at his wizard school, unleashes a deadly dark shadow. He must find a way to vanquish it to save all of Earthsea. To do this he must name it so he can bind it and send it back where it belongs. In the end, after first running from the shadow, then chasing it, he confronts it and calls it by his own name which reunites him with his shadow. He emerges a much wiser young man.

We all have shadows. If we try to deny them, or get rid of them by spewing them all over other people, we help neither ourselves nor others.

This is what I’ve learned from all the lessons my father taught me, it may be difficult to do, but in the end it’s worth it to take a step back to examine whether or not some ripple in the current of our lives is important enough to swim against. Clearly there are situations where going against the stream will eventually change the flow of the water. But often an argument is not worth the effort and in a hundred years, or even next week, no on will remember what the fight was about, nor will it have made the world a better place.

Now I’ve got to go see Earthsea the mini-series so I can write about it in more detail. I will, of course be reading the rest of the series so more to come.

Thanks for reading, liking and commenting.

Lucinda Sage-Midgorden © 2018

Lucinda is the author of The Space Between Time, an award finalist in the “Fiction: Fantasy” category of the 2017 Best Book Awards. It’s a historical, time-travel, magical realism, women’s novel, and is available in all ebook formats at Smashwords, or you can find the ebook at iBooks or Barnes and Noble. I you prefer a physical copy, you can find a print-on-demand version at Amazon. To join her email list, click here. She will never sell the names on her list.