Silencio

In my classes, the students/customers range in age from 17 to 53, give or take a year or two. Some speak more than one language. Some understand math. Some understand science. Some will make good computer programmers. Some will make good computer diagnosticians. I hope they all find successful, well-paid careers, and they will if they understand the concept of self-importance.

Some of my students remark that they have unremarkable lives, boring even.

I believe all of our lives are boring. It's what we make of our self-importance that gives our lives personal meaning. I have worked in rather mundane jobs, including restaurant kitchen cook, fast food cashier and telephone book deliverer, but in every one of those jobs I was the most important person performing my job duties and showed it. Even when I was bussing tables (cleaning up tables after restaurant patrons have left the table and paid for their meal), I treated my job with the respect I felt I deserved, never once picking up the tip, and always trying to make the tables as spotless and clean as possible. I have seen busboys swap out small denomination money for large denomination money, giving the servers the impression that the patrons had left small tips. That's a lack of self-respect, giving yourself a low sense of self-importance.

Self-importance is all about living with yourself. You get up with yourself in the morning and go to bed with yourself at night. No one's going to wake up in your body the next day - not ever (or at least not in the near-term) - so why cheat yourself? Look at the people around you as your entertainment for the day. Or see them as serving your needs, not the other way around.

I observe all the people and their self-importance around me all the time, including the nursing staff at Huntsville Hospital on Friday, some of whom had personal issues or problems that showed on their faces but which they withheld from their customers while they served the customers' medical needs. I see and hear my students/customers, who reach out in various ways in order to assure their place in society. We have self-importance but don't always know it.

Right now, I hold a copy of issue no. 8/9 of RE/SEARCH (figuratively speaking, of course - it actually balances on the desk next to this laptop computer screen). I may have talked about it before but I bring it up again because the focus of the issue, J. G. Ballard, just died. Bloggers around the world will mourn the passing of Ballard. There are whole groups devoted to his writing. I discovered him about the same time as a dear friend of mine, Joey Francis, back in our late teen years. Ballard died because of prostate cancer, I assume, if the obituary's wording is correct. I know he hadn't written anything significant in the last few years but appealed to folks in the last few generations, including the ones before me and after me (and mine, obviously).

I bring up Ballard because of his sense of self-importance. He lived a rather mundane life, having spent time as a small child imprisoned in China and then later as a single father raising kids in the English suburbs after his wife died. Yet he generated some fantastic writing. His keen observations made the difference between obscurity and fame. His self-importance made the difference between famous and meaningful. He made a difference because of who he was, not who he should have been or could have been or wasn't. He knew he could write and make money with his writing, supporting himself and his children.

Self-importance is simple. I live with doubt about many things but I don't doubt my self-importance. I know of no one who could live as me. No one can or will live as me. I was born as me and will die as me. I am with me at every moment of my life. I am not even aware that I am with me, even if our level of self-awareness is considered a unique human feature. My moments of self-awareness do not encompass the fact I am with me because I and me are one all the time. I and me are bound together so tight that using the words "I" and "me" is a falsehood. I am so important that my self-importance is a falsehood. I/me is here now and living for I/me right now, no one else. Even if I am taking out the garbage for my wife, washing my clothes and assisting with wedding preparations for my nieces/nephews, I am here for me. I don't breathe for someone else. I may breathe with someone else's lungs, but I breathe for me with them.

A writer and thinker famous in his time just died. I am not him and he was not me. But we shared our own sense of self-importance. We shared this not because of anything special but because of something rather common and boring - we're both humans. That's all there is to being self-important. Waking up. Breathing. Thinking. Walking. Talking. Working. Doing the same thing all over again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

Self-importance is just being yourself. I am not you. You are not me. We will never know precisely what gives each other our self-importance. My self-importance comes from observing others and writing about them, sometimes immediately and sometimes 30 years later. Your self-importance may come from being friends with someone you just met - through interviewing each other, you both realize you have mundane lives and then figure out that we all have mundane lives so in fact you're both human, which makes you unique and special, which in turn means you have a level of self-importance to discover and enhance.

We all live and die without being known to everyone on this planet. However, television and other mass media outlets like this Internet hyperinflate the sense of social importance that some people seem to have, giving instant celebrity status to relatively unknown people every once in a while so that we all can believe we'll be a star if the stars align just right. Is that self-importance? No, it isn't, unless your self-importance is derived from basking in the light of social stardom. Billions of people find self-satisfaction in substituting the lives of famous people for their own lives. If you completely accept and live a life like that, then you can enjoy it and enhance your self-importance through that method. No life is right or wrong - only you know what feeds your sense of self-importance.

If you believe that feeding off the preprogrammed lives of television, movie, book and Internet celebrities gives you a hollow sense of self-importance, then you have the opportunity to unplug yourself from the mass media feeding tube and find something in yourself that nourishes your self-importance. Again, mine just happens to be sitting here and writing. Many writers have that same sense of self-importance. Feeding ourselves through writing. Many readers have the complementary sense of self-importance by reading writers' words. Or seeing writers' words put into action on stage and screen, in Presidential speeches or Internet broadcasts. In other words, some people enjoy scripting life and some enjoy have their lives scripted. Some want nothing to do with either and live in silence.

I've said it more than once and will say it again. Words are lies. These words have no life of their own. They live and die in the moment, only having meaning between the time my synaptic connections put them into order and my eyes verified they were typed by my fingers. Thus, I am living a lie. I take my self-importance from that fact. I am living proof that words are unimportant, wanting no money for my writing because it has no inherent value. I can only be me and will not put out words for reading by anyone other than me because only I know the value of these words to my self-importance.

Do you understand what I'm saying? I am telling you that you are important. You have value. You are more than any words I could ever put down. I could put initials on here like R.T. and M.B.C. and show a subset of humans with English first names and last names (or nicknames) that they've reached a level of Internet stardom for as long as this blog exists in the World Wide Web (including eventual permanent archival textual storage on archive.org). But all of you, and that includes me when one of you looks at me and makes me a you to you, you have self-importance. You use it. You abuse it. You neglect it. You reflect it. It doesn't matter what it is, live it. Be your self-importance. And be sure to thank yourself 30 years from now for establishing a level of self-importance at this age that you didn't even know you wanted to enjoy 30 years later. It's not as weird as it sounds. Thirty years is not that long. It's only a percentage of your life. 200% or 33%, either way, it's just a number. Focus on the self-importance.

And don't forget that other crap I said that's a condensed, zipped up version of a few millennia of human observation. Sorry, I'm laughing at myself because I've forgotten what was so important. Uh...umm, what did I say? Oh yeah, have kids and take care of your family. And that other part that I said? Dang. It was important, too. A-ha! I remembered. These words are a lie. I'm still stuck in a life of three dimensions, x/y/z, that's moving through a fourth dimension, t, that's bound to figure out the other dimensions before it breaks through to a dimensionless existence. Then maybe I'll figure out what I'm supposed to be doing with my life!

I'm sitting here with all this technology supporting this blog, understanding many parts and levels of what makes the technology work and yet understanding that technology in and of itself is unimportant. That, my close friends and readers, is the essence of self-importance - spending time alone with unimportant stuff to feed our self-importance. Buried alive in my computer graveyard. Harmonious contradiction. Buonas noches, lectores preciosos.