Book Preview (1/3) You Should Care About Things

Excerpt 1

You should care about things. THINGS. People? Easy. The ability to care for people is instinct. Inherent. Natural. Caring for people is like caring for dogs. Everyone cares for people. Or at least a single person. To not care is impossible. To care about things? That takes guts. That takes strength. Caring about people can be hard because they can let you down, surprise you, or break your heart. They can kill, steal, and sin. But we expect this in our choice to care for them. We understand what it means to do this willingly and unconditionally. We also don’t choose to do it. We care because we must and less because we want to. But because we must, we must also want to. Caring for people sucks because even when it gets hard… it doesn't stop. Because that's just how easy it is to care for people.

Caring about things takes guts because putting the same level of love into something that isn’t a person sounds useless. Tireless. We don’t expect THINGS to hurt us. To test us, judge us, own us, and become us. But they do. We don’t expect that they will test our will, our convictions, and our own self image. We treat things as though we own them without understanding that they own us. And then when they test us or they attack us. When they do to us what is unexpected, it gets hard. Because we didn’t expect it. And well… because they aren’t people we never will. And we leave them.

People leave the things that challenge them. Which is why they are so important to care about. The people we care about solidify what we are. Human. The THINGS we care about show exactly WHO we are as humans. Where we find beauty. Satisfaction. The things we are willing to endure. The effort we are willing to put in and the places that we are willing to put that effort. To care is to think. To understand. To empathize. To test yourself and to be realistic in your expectations, but ruthless in your hopes. To truly care about a thing is to FORGET about what could happen in the negative and be so, so, so engaged with living in the positive. Forget the “what if’s” and the “maybe’s” and to just put your life into a THING because you love it. Then when the negatives happen you don’t stop. Because not stopping takes guts. And caring for things is hard.

The things we care about are the people we become. Caring about a thing is intense as it is beautiful. What you put your life into is much more telling than who you put your life into. People are easy. Things are hard. You can leave things. You love people relentlessly. Learning to love a thing the way you love a human… is art. This is why we live.

• Nick Gedda 12/26/2020