All of us are familiar with the storytelling opening line “Once upon a time… In a land far, far away…”. It immediately captures our attention and we get cozy and ready to embark on an adventure. But have you ever paused to wonder why we are truly drawn to hearing stories?

Is it merely a fascination with the opening phrase “Once upon a time…”? The phrase creates a tiny doorway between the present and the past. It tells us that something happened before this moment. It removes us from Now and asks us to enter another time and place. And this experience is not new. This is something that humans have been doing for thousands of years. Before books and paintings, and before written history, people gathered and told stories. Stories of other people and their journeys, of faraway places, of animals and plants, of life that came before them and life they imagined might come after them. Stories that carried lessons and messages from past generations.

Some of those stories we might call history today. But far in the past, storytelling was one of the ways people made what happened meaningful. Storytelling does not merely preserve history — it gives the past a human voice. And it is still true today, because finding meaning is an essential part of human existence.

While history attempts to establish what happened through evidence, such as documents, inscriptions, oral traditions, archaeology, architecture, genetics, etc., storytelling gives those facts human shape. It allows the past to feel inhabited. It brings us closer to the past. And good storytelling can make us feel the story as if it is happening right now, triggering our imagination and emotions.

But is it really only curiosity about the past that fascinates us in those stories, or is there perhaps something deeper that awakens within us and stirs our sense of wonder?

Perhaps it has something to do with the NOW — this exact moment where the “living” is happening.

In today’s chaotic world, the modern idea of “finding your purpose” has become overemphasized and inflated into something resembling a grand achievement. Many people believe that meaning, or a life’s purpose, is found in doing something great — something that would touch and impact many other lives. Somewhere within this idea, greatness can become associated with influence, achievement, power, or control. And while in that “greater” search, looking through the past and hoping for the future, people do not notice the simplest and most obvious place where meaning begins and lives — the NOW. The Now is the only place in which we can act. We cannot live yesterday again and we cannot live tomorrow yet.

And since the Now is always so busy with thoughts, experiences, memories, worries and hopes, it is often the past that we turn to in search of clues to help us find and make a meaning for our existence. We search for a meaning that might help us create a better future than the moment we are living in now.

We want to matter, and often we imagine that “to matter” means to matter on a grand scale. But what if that definition of “matter” is the problem? Perhaps it is worth trying to understand what actually matters in all of this to us as individuals and as human civilization, and where we should look for the place from which action begins. For this purpose, I invite you to consider a few important facts about us, humans, and our impact on everything around us.

Imagine an old man sitting at an old table, where he has spent many decades carving wooden toys, just as his father once did for the people of his community — people who have become his family throughout his life. He has shared their joys and struggles, helped his community, and carried on through whatever life brought them.

This brief glimpse into an old man’s life is not so distant from us today. And truly, it could belong to almost any era — today, many thousands of years ago, or perhaps even in the future.

So what, then, truly connects us throughout time?

Perhaps the most obvious things that connect human beings throughout time are also the things we tend to overlook because they are so ordinary. We are connected by the same fundamental experiences of being alive. Ancient people were born, grew up, became attached to other people, experienced joy and grief, worried about their children, searched for food and shelter, experienced illness and loss, celebrated important moments, looked at the sky, wondered about things they could not explain, and eventually died. Thousands of years can separate two human beings, yet there is something remarkably familiar in the questions and emotions that can exist between them.

We are also connected by our attempts to make meaning out of existence. Human beings have always asked questions that do not have simple practical answers. Why are we here? What happens after death? Where did the world come from? What makes a good life? What should we teach our children? What should we remember? What should we fear? What should we hope for? The answers have changed enormously across civilizations and throughout history, but the fact that we keep asking such questions may itself be one of the deepest continuities in human history.

We are connected by inheritance. Every generation receives something from the generations before it, whether it realizes it or not. We inherit languages, knowledge, customs, technologies, stories, beliefs, institutions, landscapes, buildings, artistic traditions, mistakes, conflicts and discoveries. We are born into a world that was already being constructed before we arrived.

But inheritance is not limited to the great achievements that appear in history books. We inherit small things too. A particular way of preparing food, a phrase passed down through a family, a song someone remembers, a craft learned from a parent, a story told by a grandparent, a habit of kindness, a fear, a tradition, a way of looking at the world. Much of human history survives not because someone deliberately recorded it, but because one person quietly taught something to another. Human beings continually pass pieces of themselves forward, and perhaps this is one of the most beautiful ways in which time connects us.

There is also a physical connection that is easy to forget. The matter from which our bodies are made is ancient, formed through processes that began long before humans existed. The water we drink has moved through the Earth for generations, and the air we breathe has been part of the lives of countless people before us. In a very literal sense, we are made from the same ancient material as everything that came before us.

Yet perhaps the deepest connection is simpler still — we are all temporary inhabitants of the same world trying to understand what it means to exist.

If the people of the past lived in their NOW while imagining their tomorrow, and if the people of the future will one day live in their own NOW while imagining what comes next, where does that leave us?

Perhaps we are so accustomed to looking backward for answers and forward for possibilities that we sometimes forget to notice the one place where we actually exist.

So why is this present moment so significant for us? Why does it matter? Not only is it the only point in time at which we can actually act, but it is also where humans have the opportunity to decide what kind of inheritance they will leave behind.

Every part of the future that will eventually become history must first pass through someone’s present moment.

This is easy to understand when we think about major historical events. A person who signed an important document, made a scientific discovery, created a work of art, or stood up against injustice was not living in “history” at the time. They were living in an ordinary day that happened to become historically significant later.

But there is something even more important here. Most moments do not become famous historical events, and that does not mean they are meaningless.

A mother comforting a frightened child, a teacher encouraging a student, someone choosing kindness, creating art, or sharing knowledge may never receive recognition. And yet these moments can alter individual lives, and individual lives influence other lives. The present matters because we never know which small action will become part of a much larger chain of consequences.

We often think of history as something that belongs to people who came before us, but that is only because we are looking backward. From the perspective of someone living one hundred years from now, our present will be history. They may look at our decisions, art, technology, our treatment of one another and relationship with nature, our ideas and mistakes and ask what kind of people we were. We are therefore living in someone else’s future while simultaneously creating someone else’s past.

The present is therefore far more than a point between yesterday and tomorrow, and what you do today does not only matter today; it may also matter tomorrow.

Many people imagine that their lives have little historical significance because they are not famous, powerful or responsible for some enormous achievement. We tend to associate impact with scale. We imagine that something matters only if thousands, millions or billions of people notice it. But human life does not actually work that way.

A person’s influence often travels through other people rather than directly through society as a whole.

Imagine someone who treats a child with patience. That child may carry that understanding of kindness into another relationship, and from there it may continue further. The original act may disappear from memory, but its effect can continue.

The same can happen with harmful actions. Cruelty can travel through generations. Fear can be taught. Prejudice can be inherited. Trauma can influence families. Violence can create consequences far beyond the moment in which it occurred. A person’s actions can therefore matter even when nobody records them.

This means that influence does not require fame.

A teacher can change a student’s future. A parent can shape a child’s understanding of love. An artist can give another person a moment of beauty. A stranger can restore someone’s faith in human kindness through one small action.

None of these things necessarily become “history” in the traditional sense, but they are still part of the history of humanity because humanity is made of individual human lives.

This also means that ordinary people are not outside history. They are history.

The majority of people who ever lived were not kings, queens, generals, inventors or famous artists. They were ordinary people whose names have disappeared. Yet without them, civilizations would never have existed.

Someone grew the food while another built the house. Someone raised the child and another taught the craft. Someone cared for the sick, planted the tree, made the clothing, or repaired the tool.

The enormous structures we call civilizations were built from countless ordinary lives.

Therefore, perhaps the question should not be, “Will the world remember me?” but rather, “What will pass through me into the lives of other people?” That is a very different way of thinking about significance.

Our contributions, no matter how big or small, are part of what makes human existence meaningful. They are not defined by the size of the audience or the amount of recognition received, but rather by whether something is made better because we were here.

That contribution can take many forms: knowledge, beauty, compassion and courage; a useful invention or a preserved tradition; a question that causes people to think differently; a person taught how to read; or a piece of art that gives someone peace for five minutes on a difficult day.

There is also something important about contribution that we sometimes overlook: contribution does not always mean adding something enormous to the world. Sometimes it means preventing something valuable from disappearing.

Preserving a language, a story, a piece of cultural knowledge, an artistic technique, a family memory or an ancient tradition can be a contribution to humanity because it keeps a piece of human experience available to the future.

Perhaps we should also distinguish between being historically important and being meaningful to another human being.

A person does not have to become historically important in order to be profoundly meaningful to another human being. And perhaps that is enough.

Maybe the goal of a human life is not to become significant in the eyes of the entire world. Maybe it is to make our small portion of the world a little more thoughtful, beautiful, knowledgeable, compassionate or hopeful than we found it.

If enough people do that, the effect is no longer small — it becomes civilization.

But perhaps we should not expect to know which of our actions will matter most. We cannot see the entire chain of consequences that begins with a single moment, nor can we know what a future generation will find valuable in what we leave behind. The people who came before us could not have known which of their ordinary actions, thoughts, creations or stories would survive. Perhaps this is part of the mystery of being human: we live without knowing exactly what will remain, yet we continue to create, preserve, teach, love and hope.

And perhaps, when enough of these small contributions come together, they become stories worth telling and preserving.

Throughout human history, sparks of thought and imagination have created cultures, experiences, and beliefs. Human beings have always carried something forward — a thought, a story, a belief, a discovery, a lesson, a hope. And now, in this exact moment as I am typing these words, you are reading them somewhere in my future, which is now your present. In this moment that we are sharing in different ways, intrigued by the same words, we are connected. My contribution at this time is simply to share with you that this moment, right NOW, is where everything happens and takes shape. It is important. It is limitless and yet fragile and quickly passing. In it, our whole world exists, and at the same time, it does not remain.

Imagine us as a vinyl record. The needle, moving with the passage of time itself, travels through us one by one, playing our stories — the stories of our lives. Nothing can pause this process. Yet while the record is turning, we have the opportunity to listen, to experience, to create, to choose, and to leave something behind.

We have a chance to make a decision that can ripple through time, not through our fame, but through the impact we make in this exact moment and what we pass forward to future generations. If we do not like what today’s world is offering humanity, then perhaps this is our opportunity to change what comes next. We can choose what we teach. We can choose what we preserve. We can choose whether we pass forward negativity, violence, fear and trauma, or whether we also make room for love, togetherness, knowledge, compassion, creativity and the many possibilities of human life.

Humanity has spent thousands of years struggling with itself. Where has that struggle brought us? What kind of world are we living in now? And if we could look at our own time from the distant future, would we be pleased with what we chose to leave behind?

What, then, do we want future generations to inherit from us? And why is it so important to ask ourselves this question?

Perhaps because knowing what we want to leave behind can reveal something about the meaning and purpose we can give to the moment we have in front of us.

And perhaps there is another part we have misunderstood. It is not simply about us as individual beings. Life moves through all of us and through everything around us. We are a collective of individual lives; each person is a distinct spark, yet connected to countless others. We move through and within this moment not merely to survive, but to create, experience, feel, learn, understand, express, and influence.

Perhaps we are both individual and collective at the same time — one life, and part of something much larger than ourselves.

So, what do we do right now? What will our “Once upon a time…” story tell?