What Matters

“You don't eat promises,”

When I was eight years old, I sat in the wheelbarrow my father was pushing, my legs dangling over the side, as we trundled slowly through the fields of our land, he had calloused hands and a sunburned neck, and he believed in things you could touch, a good yield, a straight fence, a promise kept. He didn't talk much, but once, passing a section of parched earth, he muttered:

“Nothing grows if you don't respect the ground.”

I know this because I wrote it in my diary and looked it up years later. He wasn't just talking about gardening. He was talking about everything: history, people, promises.

We live, as ever, on the cracked and brittle surface left by people who treated the future like a bottomless quarry. Their currency was urgency: the next quarter, the next conquest, the next flash of triumph. And we, inheritors of their erosion, are left to tend a battered soil.

“The past,” James Baldwin wrote, “is not dead. It is not even past.”

It crouches under every broken thing we pretend not to see, a living ledger of what we owe and what we've squandered.

To talk about what matters, then, is to acknowledge what has been wasted and what is still at stake.

What matters is not “progress” measured in the lifeless calculus of quarterly reports and GDP graphs, as if meaning could be priced like commodities.

What matters is the health of the ground beneath our feet, the air that doesn't rot our lungs, the quiet dignity of a life unplundered by cruelty or indifference. It is, at its core, scandalously simple: Survival. Justice. Truth.

Yet simplicity is not the same as ease. The hard thing about hard things is that they are, well, hard. When Franklin Roosevelt warned that

“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,”

… he was not issuing a motivational poster to a Harvard dorm room; he was addressing a nation hollowed out by hunger, betrayal, and dust.

We forget that what matters is often what cannot be easily monetized or explained. Ask Rachel Carson, who watched chemical giants dismiss her warnings about a dying environment with all the arrogance of a drunk aristocracy. Ask the Selma marchers, whose battered bodies testified to truths no television anchor could sanitize into “both sides.”

In writing this, I find myself thinking of my grandfather, who worked the kind of job that today would be called “unskilled” by those who have never knelt in a field under a noon sun. He never spoke in abstractions. (He was a painter at Wallsend Shipyard and planted food in his small garden at home)

“You don't eat promises,” he told me time and time again. “You eat what you plant.”

The small garden had potatoes, leeks, and carrots, the kind of stubborn, unglamorous crops that survive even when the world forgets they are needed.

I remember one bitter winter when the pipes froze and the power went out for two days. While neighbors fretted and argued with the power company and government, my grandfather calmly took potatoes from the parlour, boiled them over a fire he built, and handed them to me like they were treasure. “You don't eat promises,” he said again, handing me the bowl. That winter, I understood it fully.

We are so far now from the elemental clarity of that world. We eat what algorithms plant. We live inside a system so vast and spectral that the gears are invisible but grind just the same. Our “disruptors” wear sneakers to board meetings and assure us they are changing the world, even as they enclose it, bit by bit, behind paywalls and patents.

We are told to be “optimistic,” to “look on the bright side,” as if history is a parlor trick we can wish away. As if the machinery of exploitation, once set in motion, will grind itself to a stop out of sheer boredom.

No. What matters is not optimism. It is courage.

Courage is not the absence of fear but the stubborn refusal to let fear set the terms of our existence. It is the protester facing down a phalanx of riot shields. It is the whistleblower releasing documents knowing it may cost them everything. It is the scientist publishing findings that powerful interests would pay fortunes to suppress. It is the single mother getting up every day and keeping a promise to her children in a world that does not keep promises back.

We live in a time when facts themselves are under siege. When “truth” is reduced to a consumer preference, like a soda flavor. Orwell warned us that

the Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.

Today, we nod grimly at memes about “fake news” and move on, as if awareness were inoculation.

But awareness without action is a kind of complicity. Knowing better and doing nothing is a greater betrayal than ignorance. And so, we return, stubbornly, to what matters.

It matters when a child can breathe freely without clutching a rationed inhaler, when her lungs are not collateral damage in someone else's profit ledger. It matters when a elder can sit by a warm fire without counting out coins and sacrifices. It matters when a judge can tell the truth, “I will not be touched, mocked, bought”, and not fear being dragged to ruin for it.

It matters that we plant gardens even if the world seems set on burning every field. It matters that we vote even when the system creaks and shudders under the weight of its own cynicism. It matters that we teach children to name the stars and the birds and the rivers, even if someday those names might be all that is left.

This is not an essay about “hope,” a word that has been taxidermized by politicians, as Obama did, and sold back to us in gift shop mugs. Hope without action is a narcotic. What matters is responsibility. It is the humble, daily, infuriating work of not surrendering to the siren song of despair or cynicism.

What matters is not asked politely. It demands of us something relentless and unfinished.

It demands that we show up, again and again.

“You don't eat promises,” my grandfather said. No, you eat what you plant. Every day I plant, in soil that has been beaten and stripped and poisoned, because even still, something stubborn inside knows: if anything matters, our foundations do!

Stay curious

Colin