From the Editor’s Desk: Mattering (Premium)

I’m always fascinated when I discover that something I’ve independently arrived at is in fact well understood and has a formal name.

The best recent example, perhaps, is the phrase “doom pile,” which I discovered this past May and have been doing my entire life. That is, instead of actually cleaning clutter, which in most cases requires you to actually move it from your life, I had been organizing it, making things look tidy and decluttered when they were not.

I was also delighted when my wife told me about “hello people,” the people we see in passing out in the world with whom we exchange pleasantries, because I’ve long felt that these interactions were not just emotionally positive but create a sense of community. And then I was even more delighted when I later discovered that these relationships are formally known as “weak ties” or “peripheral ties,” and that they are indeed quite important to our wellbeing.

This isn’t about being “right.” In the first example, I was literally doing the wrong thing over many decades, and while I wish I had learned what I was doing a long time ago, I can at least change now. Instead, it’s just about always learning and continuing down the right path by continuing the good behaviors and adjusting the bad ones.

The other morning, my wife and I were reading the news as we always do, and I came across another example of this phenomenon. And this one was interesting to me on several levels because I had never really thought about it explicitly, but still feel very much like I do it and have been doing it more and more as I’ve gotten older. And I have very specific examples of people who have—or have not—done it for me.

It’s called “mattering,” and while it’s not a new concept (to me), it is immediately recognizable. There are people who make you feel that you matter, and this is a primary component of well-being. Conversely, there are people who make you feel that you don’t matter, and we can all predict how that makes us feel. Mattering means that you will be missed when you’re gone, that you are valued literally because you add value to their lives.

I love this.

Some of my strongest childhood memories are of my grandmother, my mother’s mother, who I called Gram most likely because my earliest attempts at saying grandma fell short. I was born right around the time her husband passed away, and whether it was that or just that I was her first grandchild, we always had a close relationship, and I would spend many weekends with her, something my siblings and cousins rarely did.

Gram understood how to be a good grandmother, and she made it about me. She took me to see and ride on the trains and trolleys in Forest Hills, one of Boston’s MBTA terminuses. She would always cook me a T-bone steak in a small iron skillet, and Welsh rarebit, which, yes, I thought was rabbit. And we would watch TV together—I remember The Laurence Welk Show most of all—while eating cottage cheese and canned fruit. Curious food choices for a boy of single-digit years, but something I loved and still do.

People sometimes distort memories like this. They will say something like, “Back when I was a kid, we always did whatever,” when in fact that was something they did only once or infrequently. But my weekends with Gram were not like that. They were regular and I always looked forward to them, and they continued until she died when I was a teenager. I never outgrew Laurence Welk and cottage cheese. Gram made me feel like I mattered. I hope I did the same for her. You know, I think I did.

Flash forward 40-ish years, and I have a better handle on relationships, those that matter, and those that are toxic. I’ve specifically walked away from people who were negative influences, which is hard but, I think, can be necessary. And I’ve unfortunately let good relationships languish and die because I’m not good at keeping up with people and they often confuse that, understandably, with me not caring. This is possibly my worst attribute, though there are several contenders.

I’ve also written in the past about people who have overtly positive outlooks and how important it is to let yourself be influenced by that. But we might reframe that discussion now to include or even focus on those who make you feel like you matter. With the explicit goal of ensuring that we do the same for the people who matter most to us.

And here, I can honestly say that I do try. Whether it’s personal or professional, I want the people who matter to me to know how important they are. My wife knows this because I’ve discussed it with her, but it is very interesting to me, now a middle-aged white guy who might understandably not be picking up any new tricks, has turned into a person who openly expresses love for others. To this, I fully credit my friend Joe, whom I don’t see often enough because he lives near Boston. Joe, who embarrassingly reads my articles and will see this.

And that’s fine. Better than fine. Thanks to Joe, I have evolved to the point where I can tell people—friends, male friends, whatever—how I really feel about them, can say something as basic and vulnerable as “I love you.” And it is the most freeing thing imaginable, which is nice for me personally. But it is also very much a way of letting them know that they matter.

Because they do matter. And they deserve to know that.