All about you

My eldest was young when he looked his grandmother in the eye in the middle of a conversation.

“Grandma,” he said gravely, “it’s not all about you.”

“Dead serious,” she described it later. “If that doesn’t bring you up short …”

My darling boy had heard those words many a time from his mother.

“It’s not all about you” came in handy when my offspring fussed over childish wants or pouted about decisions that didn’t go their way.

Humans enter the world designed to be self-absorbed. Their world truly is all about them — their hunger, their tiredness, their need for physical contact and closeness. It’s how they survive.

After a while, though, a kid’s gotta grow up.

“It’s not all about you,” I told my kids time and again as they worked their way out of infantile self-absorption toward maturity. Possibly not the world’s best parenting strategy, but the words carried one of life’s most important lessons, and I figured they might as well hear it from me.

Not that I’m always the best example.

You’d think, from the way I sometimes sigh over niceties I can’t have or fume because of some trivial slight or grump when others don’t follow rules I concoct for them, that life is, in fact, all about me.

Traffic diverted because of construction is about inconveniencing me, not about the people working hard to make my road safer.

The store clerk’s impatience is a direct attack on my importance, not a sign that she’s had a tough day and could use a smile.

We all trod along in our own bubbles, living lives only we can live and shaped by experiences only we have experienced. Truly, in a sense, we inhabit little worlds that do revolve only around us.

But we also partake of the big, all-in world, full of other people in the center of their own bubbles, each of us bumping about and jostling for position and forgetting over and over that it’s not all about us.

In fact, from a high-up perspective, ain’t none of it about any of us.

We, the foolish beings who fill a tiny fraction of the universe, are infinitesimally small, here for a moment and gone like a puff of smoke.

We fuss and fume and raise our tiny fists, making barely a squeak in the vast mass of humanity that carpets the planet.

Our tears add no volume to the ocean of human sorrow, our sighs wisp into the wind and disappear as nothing.

In my kitchen, at my desk, behind my steering wheel, I’m my own all-in-all, but amid the 7-plus billion people on the planet, I am merely a speck — and a small one, at that.

It’s not all about me.

But, on Easter morning, an empty tomb gave a different message.

For the sake of scrambling, digging, me-first mankind, our brother and friend set aside His crown and let a whip fall across his back.

To soothe our nothing tears and tiny hearts, He hung and hurt and forgave those who killed Him.

Though we should be no more to our Maker than ants in a glass-walled terrarium, our Savior charged into epic battle with death and won, handing each of us His crown and calling us His own.

It’s all about you, little ones, God whispers, telling us daily of His love, His acceptance, His presence in our tiny lives as he slips through our bubble walls and walks alongside us, insignificant though we are.

A loving Father at our side, we can lift our eyes to those around us, walking through their own bubble lives.

We can set aside our self-absorption and notice others’ worries and fears, pay attention to the love behind their actions and extend a hand when they feel alone.

We can stop using words that hurt, even if we’re not the ones feeling their sting.

I’m not the center of the universe, and neither are you. 

And that’s OK.

The God who knows all about us and loves us anyway looks us in the eye — dead serious — and brings us up short with the image of His son on a cross.

Darling child, He says, it’s all about you.

First published in The Alpena News on April 23, 2022.