What Use Are You?

Friday night sucked balls. Big huge fuzzy balls.

It started out with a promise I made to some friends that I hadn’t seen for a while since they’d been in the bay for a week and a half. My friends, Smash and Bitch as I’ll call them for privacy reasons, are twins and they just had their birthday a couple weeks ago but on that same day, Bitch lost the love of her life, someone that her and her sister’s circle of friends knew very well. So that’s why they went back to the bay and when they got back last week our group of friends all agreed to go out this last Saturday to kick off the last stint of the semester. All went well until Bitch got a little sentimental and then it all went downhill. After finally getting everyone back to the twins’ house the group focused their efforts on comforting her and being there for her.

“No one told me he was going to die,” she’d say. “Now I can’t be with the person I’m supposed to be with. No one could ever love me like he did!”

Smash was brokenhearted for her sister; it pained her to see her other half hurt like that. Soon she broke down and I talked to her. I told her all the things Bitch needed to hear but not from me, things she’d have to learn on her own. I told her that she needed to be strong for her sister and be there to remind this wasn’t senseless, that everything has reason, as senseless and desperate as that might seem.

In Mukherjee’s Jasmine, this idea is very well implemented. Jasmine is talking to her boyfriend Taylor about the possibility of life’s “assignments” given to everyone. While he believes that everyone has a monumental mission, Jasmine argues that someone’s purpose of “rearranging a particle of dust is as important as discovering relativity” (61), as Taylor simplifies it. According to her beliefs, purpose in life can be incredibly small, a belief she’s retained from her cultural upbringing, a belief which is insulting to Taylor’s beliefs that God’s will and plan for everyone is on a larger scale. Perhaps this isn’t just a belief that is specific to Taylor but instead an idea created in the American culture. For example, there are advertisements everywhere promoting ideas like “be all you can be” from the Army, along with “an Army of one.” These are direct messages that promote being a substantial icon, someone that does big things in their life. Then there are other messages that aren’t as direct such as our focus on celebrities and their lifestyles. It’s never said outright, but all the focus they get implies that to important it helps to be just like them. With that sort of mentality, it’s understandable why Taylor would be scared of the idea that it’s possible that not everyone’s life could be that impactful.

But in that same light, Bitch’s loss was for nothing: the person she lost never wrote a book, starred in a movie, saved millions of lives, or discovered something new. THAT is what I find impossible. I know from my own experience that it doesn’t take acts of greatness to change the world. As I’ve written about before, I lost my little sister last September and because of that I was able to meet my biological father for the first time and experience the reality of all the people that loved her and the family. She never did anything but live her life and love the people around her and yet the impact of her life sparked those events in my life that I will never forget and memories that I will carry for the rest of my life. These events and memories have impacted my life in my outlook on life in general, ideals that I’ve shared with many people and that I hope to pass on to my children. These things aren’t as monumental as the discovery of gravity or of the atom but they can start a snowball effect that builds upon other things that can lead to bigger and bigger things. For example, while it was unfortunate that my sister passes, it allowed me to meet a whole family I never knew about, people I’m still in contact with and are a part of my life. It was also because of her death that the Whitley Peterson Foundation was created to allow for scholarships that will allow someone to go to school that wouldn’t have been able to before.

Someone’s purpose in life could be so small as to “pluck a certain flower and release a certain seed” (60). That seed might grow into a field of flowers that someone picks those flowers for someone who is in the hospital and needs that gift to feel better. Who knows what could happen after that… When the possibilities of our impact on the world are that endless, “why shouldn’t our lives be infinitesimal?” (60). That doesn’t mean that our live don’t hold any importance but that everyone’s lives are equally important in their own unique way.

I related this idea to Smash while I calmed her down. His life and death had purpose. We might not see it now but it will manifest itself in Bitch’s, their friends’, and her lives.

About a year and a half ago I got a tattoo that symbolizes this idea that everything happens for a reason. The design is from Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and it represents an encompassing power that drives everything to an absolute and inescapable destiny. The series calls it KA but as it’s explained, religious groups labels it as God’s will. It’s a universal idea that I hold true to and because I have the tattoo on my arm where anyone can see it, I explain this concept to everyone that asks about it as I told Smash, and if her friend or Whitley’s death didn’t serve any purpose then life in general is useless universally.