we are a small poppy seed inside a great big bowl
Talking with a friend, one of my favorite albums from childhood came into topic, "Ruído Rosa", a kind of "pop-ish", kind of "doing it's own thing" work by an amazing brazilian band: Pato Fu. This was one of my favorite albums as a kid because Pato Fu was one of my favorite bands, not because it stands out from the rest of the discography in any way, at least I didn't think so when I wrote on my old sketchbook that "Pato Fu is a group of geniuses that can never make mistakes". Since then I sure matured, and even though that godlike group was being pushed back by everything else new I came to find, going back to them recently was an experience just like the marvelous nirvanas I transitioned myself into as a kid, laying down on the carpet, listening to the magic needle playing the most wonderful pieces of music. Pato Fu is a timeless band that produced hundreds of timeless works, and I couldn't love them more than now that I have a better understanding of their philosphies, hence the topic of this post: Pato Fu's view of the value of an individual.
Their song "Tribunal de Pequenas Causas Realmente Pequenas", starts with the following:
"Você pensa que faz o que quer
Não faz
E que quer fazer o que faz
Não quer"
(in translation:
"you think you do what you want to do
you don't
and that you want to do what you want to do
but you don't")
The rest of the song has the speaker telling this interlocutor that nothing they want to do, or want to happen will happen if it's not written in destiny's book. In other words, the song is about people thinking they have freedom of choice and the ability to create their own paths, when in reality they don't, and whatever has to happen will happen. An individual's sorrows and desires are of no value, because their small claims are really small in the court of destiny.
Humans are insignificant in their individuality, and it's depressing, sure, but you also need to know that that's just part of what being a human is, or being anything at all really, either inside this planet or out there in space.
To me, happiness is about accepting that you are really small in a really big universe, and I don't even need to go that far, honestly. Like what Kimya Dawson says in her song "I Like Giants", "Look at the ocean and the desert and the mountains and the sky / Say 'I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye'", the world is already really big compared to our small individual existences. But the thing is that that doesn't mean you have to give up thinking you are any important, just as she says later in the song, "We all become important when we realize our goal / Should be to figure out our role within the context of the whole". Being a small poppy seed inside a great big bowl doesn't mean you're less important then the bowl, people still need you to make opium and get high, but how would they make opium if you were not picked up in the poppy fields and put into a bowl in the first place? If you didn't matter, "Les Paradis Artificiels" would be incomplete, many great works of literature and music would not be written, Wagner's compositions would fall flat after watching it for the 10th time in a row inside the same week in the 1800s. Everybody and everything has a little bit of importance, doesn't matter the size. The deal is not thinking you matter anymore than your neighbors, or the bed you sleep on every night, and to think you are just a single piece in the infinite jigsaw of the universe.
Does that comfort you in any way? Knowing that you don't matter but can't do nothing about it? Does for me, honestly.