No, this isn’t one of those indictments on the state of the “social media sphere” for the past year, but rather a reflection on weight.
“Lay your burden down,” the old blues refrain goes, and somehow for many of us that’s the same refrain for this year. For me, 2011 was not a year to wallow in despair or bask in glory, hype the highs or lament the lows, curate them every now and then… those are things that bear too much weight for things that are really important. Things, people, events, and memories that are worth their weight. Things, people, events, and memories that are worth bearing.
Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, wrote a little nugget of wisdom that I’ve somehow carried throughout the years: “Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.” This year, I stopped believing that completely. There are a lot of things that have, in time, become valuable to me. There are things that have no worth in others’ eyes that have become valuable to me. And the world works because of that: we weigh things not according to the concrete but the abstract, and nonetheless real.
When we lay our burden down, that’s when we know what things in that burden weigh the most.
