Tonight’s question sounds simple enough to fit on a coffee mug. What really matters? It has that deceptive, postmodern-banal shine to it — the kind of question that looks worn smooth by a thousand casual answers, until you actually try to stand on it and feel how deep the water goes underneath.
The trouble starts with the last word. Matters. What does it even mean for a thing to matter? Say it out loud a few times and it starts to split into two creatures wearing one coat. On one side, matter is a judgment — a subjective little arrogance, me deciding from my narrow chair that this thing counts and that thing doesn’t. On the other side, matter is an affect, a charge, an actual elevation of energy in the chest when something lands. It’s reality dressed up against fiction, and it’s reality standing there unvarnished, if such a state is even available to a creature like us. Before we can answer what really matters, we may have to sit for a while in the strange double life of the word doing the asking.
I keep circling back to stories. They’ve given us comfort for as long as there have been fires to sit around, but comfort isn’t the whole of it — there’s something underneath the comfort, some motif humming below language that seems to recognize an ideal it’s never been shown directly. Where that ideal came from is a detour too wide to take tonight. But the addiction itself, the appetite for narrative, pulls me toward the little I know of Campbell and Jung — toward the thought that we carry an ineffable, sub-lingual wiring for the hero’s arc, a shape we recognize the instant it appears the way an infant recognizes a face before it knows what a face is.
Reality, it seems, gets built out of belief the same patient way a cave gets built out of water — drop by drop, mostly before we were capable of discernment enough to notice it happening. The foundational imprints landed when we had no words yet to sort them, just raw sensory weather and whatever emotional state happened to be moving through the room at the time. Those imprints don’t stay sharp. They soften into a kind of dewy mist, ineffable, and that mist becomes the hidden operating system underneath every later thought — shifting, yes, evolving, yes, but slower and slower as the years accumulate their sediment on top of it.
Which brings me to a different definition of transcendence than the one I grew up with. Maybe transcendence was never about rising past some physical plane, some cloud-layer separating earth from heaven. Maybe true transcendence is smaller and stranger than that — the act of climbing high enough inside your own mind to see past the event horizon of the ineffable black box you were building before you even knew construction had started. Not escaping the body. Escaping the unseen architecture.
And then, waiting at the bottom of all of it like a trapdoor, is nihilism, offering its flat, final answer: nothing matters, because mattering was always just a criterion pretending to be a law of nature. But even nihilism can’t hold its own door shut for long, because the very next question walks right through it. What criteria? Who wrote them down? A dead end that keeps talking after it dies is not really a dead end. It’s an invitation dressed as a wall.
So maybe the real work tonight isn’t answering what matters, but sitting a little longer with who’s been quietly writing the criteria all along, and whether we were ever given a pen of our own.