MyOwnPirateRadio

As humans we long to be part of something larger than ourselves. To be part of a community, a school, a team, a family, a marriage, a project, a city, a country, a race, a religion, a movement. We each yearn to be part of something that is bigger and more important and hopefully more permanent than any of us as individuals ever could be.

This desire is deep-seated in every human. It is about mattering; when all is said and done, we want it to matter that we lived. And when we plug into something bigger than ourselves, when we help design it or build it or make it go, we’ve undeniably done something that matters. We’ve changed the world and people around us, hopefully for the better.

This instinct has everything to do with life and death. Becoming part of something larger than oneself is a way of persisting, a way of cheating death, even if only for a short while. “You can take away my life, but you can’t take away my participation in the greater whole.” This is true even for fleeting, ephemeral experiences. Take the fall of the Berlin Wall, for instance: it lasted only a short moment, but the event lives on in human memories and written history, and it will surely have a ripple effect through time.

When we lived in Nigeria my mother started a school for me and my kid brother and sister. It grew quickly to encompass our friends, and then many more. At the time it seemed perfectly ordinary to me; we needed a school, there weren’t any good ones around, so my mother started one. I didn’t fully understand the impact of the school until a chance meeting ten years ago, at 2 a.m. in a computer science lab at the University of Waterloo. A young man sitting across the lab spotted me, walked across the room and introduced himself. He said, “I know you. You went to Plateau Private School, in Jos. Nigeria. 1976. I remember you, and I remember the school.” We were five years old, back then, halfway across the world. Neither of us would ever have set foot in a university if it weren’t for that school, and for my mother.

The school matters. It is still running today, graduating hundreds of kids each year. Each of them has an infinitely larger opportunity in life than they would have had without it.

My mother matters. (She didn’t have to build a school to prove that to anyone, of course. We knew it all along, mum.) She acted out of an iron-willed drive to get the best she possibly could out of life for her kids, and along the way — lucky for everyone — she decided to build it into something bigger than herself.

We need something bigger than us to need us back… to give our lives purpose… to make us real.