The things that matter

A dear friend of mine lost someone very important to her the other day. I just found out about it and it coalesced something that's been forming in my mind for several days now. It's a fairly simple question, that seems to cause a lot of problems for all of us humans. What parts of life actually matter?

If you ask a thousand people, you'll get a thousand answers, but this is one of the times that actions speak far louder than words. In the end, people almost always come back to the same things, family, friends, and the others we love who don't fall into those neat little categories. When tragedy strikes, the first people most of us worry about are our loved ones, our relatives, and our friends. If the zombie apocalypse were to strike tonight, tomorrow morning half of us would be traveling to check on those people who matter most to us. The cars, the houses, the toys and the technology cease to matter when the people we care about are in trouble.

Maybe that's what makes us human; maybe that's what proves that we do have a spark of the divine.
As long as the things that truly matter are the people I care about, I have hope. And large quantities of hope can carry a body through everything.