OTHER PEOPLE'S LIVES

My brother, Kevin, who is not on social media, called me to tell me about my cousin, Vicky, who is.
About my writing, Kevin said she shared with him, “My God, your sister is so dark!’”
“Are you sure she said dark and not deep,” I probed?
“No,” he replied. “She said dark!”

We both laughed but honestly, I’ve been feeling a little dark. Not in a hopeless way. More, in disappointment at just how remarkably unmeaningful so much of our collective communication is.

With such an extraordinary opportunity we all have to make a difference in the world, I’ve developed what I would call an aversion to meaningless social media posts. Meaningless. That’s judgy to say. Yes. I hear it. And still, there are so many messages on my feed that make me shake my head.

In response to something Kylie Jenner posted on Instagram that instantly received 18 million likes, a British advertising executive posted a single picture of an egg and dared people to like it more than all the rest.

55,709,732 likes [including mine] later, that picture of a brown farm-fresh egg has eclipsed every other post on Instagram. Ever. Even beating the post of Billy Eilish when she shared [with 23 million people liking] that she had changed her hair to blonde. If you can imagine that.

With the words, “God, your sister is dark,” rolling around in my head,  I do my best to put meaning to the world’s obsession with one simple speckled egg. “Let’s set a world record together,” the post implores. And just like that, humanity did.

…”Together.” To borrow from the egg and its wisdom, maybe all this has something to do with a communal cracking under the pressure from all this divide. Perhaps the light-hearted imagery of something so commonplace was necessary to prove the power of common ground.

This week, battling covid, I am more aware than ever that none of us is immune to what it means to be human. We are all vulnerable. Like the egg.

When I view the nearly 56 million likes as an act of solidarity, I begin to understand how that sense of belonging is what every single one of us craves. No matter if the content seems trivial or every day.

Maybe in reality, the depth I’m seeking depends on my own response to what I see—

In how I approach without judgement
In the way I embrace that not everything must be “serious” to be meaningful
In admitting that the value of something doesn’t depend on me

Life is grave and then it’s funny. Life is complicated and then simple like cereal and milk.

We may bear witness to the superficiality of our humanness one day, and then stand in awe of something earth-shaking we accomplish the next.

What we are given are not full-length motion pictures but snapshots of other people’s lives. What can we really know from the fragments of laughter and suffering we are invited to view?—
That there is something of ourselves imbedded there.
That the light-hearted spirit brings relief to the dark.
That there is some measure of courage embedded in every picture or word.
That there is nothing trivial about this life we share.