Love is not important if you seek it to be loved.   If you seek love to belong, it becomes important.

Money is not important if you always want more, if you use it to buy junk, accumulate material things, and to buy friends, power, and influence, it is important, but you just wasted its best use. Money is only useful if you can use it to belong to something greater than yourself. Money used this way will heal, help, sustain, and complete your reason for being. Fame is not important if you gain it for fifteen minutes and launch a career based on trash culture and shallow values. Fame is important too, if you use it to belong to something larger than yourself.

In other words, love, money, and fame are just like sex, drugs, and rock and roll. They can benefit you and others when used correctly and according to directions. They can destroy you, and others when abused.

Simply put there is nothing in this life that means anything, nothing that is “important” if it does not in some way connect you to all other life.

You are made of water, some minerals and chemicals, and some energy. That is all your material body is. It is not a babe magnet. It is not a holy temple.  It is just some atoms arranged into something called “You.”  But what if this matter is not all there is to you, but you are something greater to which all matter, from dew drops to galaxies is a part of. Then you are a part of what could be called Belonging.  Belonging is what is important.

Belonging is important because only our belonging can unite us to end war. Only our realization that we all share air, water, soil and limited space can be important enough to help us find our way.  Only finding our common ground can end political squabbles and centuries old dogma that constantly erupts to destroy us, rather than unite us. Only finding, that so far as we know for now, we just have this one little world, and this one little chance to belong to an astonishing planet that we must share with many, many other life forms.  We need to belong to one another to take care of one another. We need to find why a person matters no matter their color or creed.  We need to think that other living things have a right to be as well.  We could not live without them. We need to realize that love matters, money matters, and even fame matters, but only when we find the important benefits they can give us.

Give love to get love.  Remember love is action, not emotion.  It is the work of giving of your self, whether to water a seedling, or to swear fidelity to a lover. Remember that money is a tool to be used, but not mismanaged.  Acquiring money can become an addiction, so always remember its purpose, not its lure.  Remember fame is as fleeting as a mote of dust in the wind, you must use it wisely for the short time that you can do so.

Finding what is important is actually very simple. It is to recognize that you belong.