Unimportances

“All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages its guerrilla war, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise.” –Milan Kundera

I went to a wedding back in Minnesota this weekend—one last chance to see family and friends. It was wonderful; no one tripped down the aisle, everyone showed up on time, nothing was spilled on the bride’s dress… a fairytale beginning for the dear couple. But as I prepared to head back to Pasadena, chaos struck. I tried to save some money and fly standby, only to come back to my roommates crying after seven hopeless hours trying to find a flight into LAX. I flew to California early the next morning, wondering if my $300 booked ticket was worth it—if anything was worth it. Why was I going back? How did I ever convince myself that it would be okay to leave my home for a whole year, to completely start over? Why wasn’t I grounded in a job, in a familiar land, in solidity, like everyone else? Why wasn’t I getting married, too? My year in the Czech Republic seemed dismally unimportant in the whole scheme of things. I should be working toward a dream job, a family, a good retirement fund. I should want stability. I should want a 50-year plan. I should want a 401K in a time where the very concept of one is a myth.

But who am I fooling? It is the unimportant things that are the most important, says Kundera. I go through the days here literally hour by hour, information session by information session. Our days are governed by mealtimes. We get fat, and we swear we will wake up the next morning at 6 and run it all off. We live for the weekends. (On Saturday, we are going to the beach.) We are tired. We set ourselves with the challenge of making it through the next teaching practicum, and then wake up again the next morning and do it all over again. Life is a series of small goals, and it is easy to lose sight of the big picture.

So where is the balance? It is in simply being, of course. Later on in his book Kundera writes, “There is no more boisterous, no more unanimous agreement than the agreement with being.” The balance is in being able to recall, to look back at where we’ve come from and see where the small things got us. The difference Kundera writes about is when we choose willingly to forget the small unimportances. If this happens—and it does happen, too often—that is when the war turns ugly. The unimportances, for better or for worse, are what change the world. Built from the bottom up, they catch us by surprise when the end result—that “big picture” that we have so lovingly planned out—turns out much differently than we ever intended.