Some months back, I was trying to discover some basic truths about life.

I asked numerous people who mattered to me to send me their thoughts on the matter, and it came as no surprise to me that one of the most insightful comments came from my daughter Pauline. She wrote that what really mattered in life was family, and that living that belief was the most important thing to her.

[caption id="attachment_1604" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Family, what matters most"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/387226_10150524004317122_838372121_8760500_573618796_n.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1604" title="387226_10150524004317122_838372121_8760500_573618796_n" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/387226_10150524004317122_838372121_8760500_573618796_n-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a>[/caption]

"I always put my family first," she said.

Recently, when I wrote about the Proust questions and posted an interview with myself, Pauline sent me an e-mail -- not for publication -- in which she answered the same questions. Her answers showed something I knew all along -- that what she had said earlier was 100 percent sincere, 100 percent true.

That left me wondering, because I agreed with her 100 percent. If you look at the basic human motivations, going back thousands of years, it seems to me that loving and being loved are pretty near the top of the list. Certainly there are others that matter, such as the desire for security, but it seems to me that so much of modern society with its "he who dies with the most toys wins" attitude has gone off track somewhere.

I could ask almost any of my friends who have children what matters most to them, and I can't think of any of them who would rate their careers ahead of their families. Even the ones who haven't been particularly successful, when I look at the choices they have made, their career problems have come because they refused to put their jobs ahead of their families.

The other night I was watching "Awakenings," the wonderful film from 1990 in which experimental drug therapy helped "awaken" patients who had been catatonic for more than 40 years since an encephalitis epidemic in 1926. Some of the patients were resentful, upset at how much of their lives had been lost. The main character, played by Robert DeNiro, wanted people who hadn't been through it to understand what really mattered.

After his character was once again catatonic, his doctor -- played by Robin Williams -- passed along his thoughts.

"What we do know is that, as the chemical window closed, another awakening took place; that the human spirit is more powerful than any drug - and<em> that</em> is what needs to be nourished: with work, play, friendship, family. <em>These</em> are the things that matter. This is what we'd forgotten - the simplest things."

I couldn't agree more.