Month: February 2026

“What do you call it when people living in the wealthiest, most powerful country on the planet report feeling worn down, burned out and on edge?”

So writes Jenifer Szalai, nonfiction book critic for the New York Times, in a review of books that “delve into our primal desire to feel valued and worthy of attention.”

Explanations for this condition, Szalai writes, include political breakdown, economic inequality and an epidemic of loneliness. But, the books suggest a crisis of “mattering” – feeling valued – a core human need that has grave consequences when it isn’t met.

For nonhuman animals, the Darwinian mechanism of gene propagation is paramount, Szalai writes. “They don’t write poetry, paint paintings or compose symphonies. Humans, though, do all sorts of strange, glorious and sometimes destructive things that are utterly superfluous (or even counter) to brute survival.”

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of “The Mattering Instinct,” suggests these actions flow from our unique human longing to matter. In pursuit of mattering projects, we humans try to resist entropy because our human brains have the ability to identify it.

Goldstein maps the human mattering drive. “Socializers” want to matter to others. “Competitors” want to matter more than others. “Transcenders” want to matter to God or the universe. “Heroic Strivers” want to do something (artistic, athletic, intellectual) that matters to them.

Our mattering projects bring us a sense of purpose, Szalai writes, but references Goldstein that the longing to matter can also misdirect us and lead us astray. Also, mattering and happiness are not the same.

The publication of books on mattering “is clearly a reflection of something larger,” Szalai writes. “There is a lack, or a void, that has been ascendent in the last several years – the nihilism of ‘lol nothing matters’ and ‘I really don’t care. Do U?’ There is also the growing problem of our collapsing attention spans. All of these issues are connected.”

What matters to you? Is this the same as meaning and purpose for life? And, does it really matter?

An important book that informs the convening and concept of Contemplative Poets is “An Ocean of Light” by Martin Laird. 

Laird quotes Archbishop Rowan Williams who declares that contemplation “is a deeply revolutionary matter.”

Laird goes on to write that “contemplation liberates us from the seeds of violence in our own heart, especially from our individual and social compulsions to find someone to blame for the ills that befall us – such compulsions do nothing but keep us bent over ourselves, blind to what constitutes a human.”

From Thaddeus of Vitnovnica, Laird shares: “If our thoughts are kind, peaceful, and quiet, turned only toward good, then we also influence ourselves and radiate peace all around us – in our family, the whole country, everywhere. This is true not only here on earth, but in the cosmos as well.”

Contemplation, and the lifestyle leading to it and flowing from it, asks but a single question, ‘What does kindness look like at any given moment’” Laird writes.

The problem is, according to Laird, our minds are deeply cluttered. He uses the metaphor of the cluttering and decluttering of our minds as a way of considering how the practice of contemplation works.

“The metaphor allows us to look at the contemplative process of liberation from a point of view other than that of acquiring something we think we do not have and therefore must up with a strategy to acquire, possess and control.  Think of a bright and spacious room whose polished wooded floor is covered with mounds of clutter of whatever sort. The practice of contemplation gradually declutters our minds, gradually revealing the brightly polished floor – the radiant core of all – that we did not realize was already there…”

“Our guiding metaphor of clutter and the process of decluttering (release, letting be, letting go, non-clinging) bring to the fore certain topics crucial to the practice of contemplation.

The same process of decluttering is the foundation of the beauty of poetry. We seek to recognize and celebrate only the essence of what really is. A revolutionary act, indeed!