my unimportant opinion.

dear nancy; 
     i appreciated that after your long retreat you had that realization of our impermanence and unimportance. i also appreciate how important family must be in that regard. 
     honestly, i don't think much about family. it's lovely if not exactly how i view the situation. family must help one feel important or at least afford one a sense of belonging. i've never had much of a family life. so i remember my longer retreats as occassions when, with no sense of personal history, friends or family, i came to know myself simply as a living organism, and eventually not even that: like in deep sleep or samadhi.
     since my life has been a fundamentally solitary one i feel like i understand the importance of each living being, from a blade of grass to an elephant and certainly any human, that i see or come to know. and so i sense the strange contradiction: that we're both important and unimportant. after all, we‘re apparently both a transitory body and the very life continuum that animates it. 
     this is of course not a definitive statement on the subject of our importance or unimportance. but there's something about this path we’re on, and specifically meditation, that leaves one, in the end at least, ok with not having all those big questions answered. one seems to nevertheless end up with great love, affection, tremendous happiness and a deep appreciation for the apparent endless wonder that we call creation.
     best wishes always; nathan.