I can only hope that the changes I make to the lives of those around me are as positive as the changes those around me have made to my life.

Now there’s a goal we should all write in our notebooks.

I can only hope that the changes I make to the lives of those around me are as positive as the changes those around me have made to my life.

Thanks for your thoughts David!

Mosquito killing I’m not sure about, but we all do much more than just kill mosquitoes.

If you’d left a shorter and less thought-provoking comment, I would have been done responding to it ten minutes ago, and that would mean one to-do item on my list will have to wait until another day, which might represent one conversation I will never have, whose resultant effects I could never know. The dominoes never stop falling, and no living being ever stops setting off chains of them.

There is just too much of a volume of causes and effects for a human life not to have profound effects on other lives. You don’t need to invent the light bulb, be a parent, or even leave your couch to trigger profound changes to the rest of the world.

As a kid, I read a science fiction book about time travel. This guy went into prehistoric times, and killed a mosquito by accident. When he returned to modern times, the world was in utter chaos. Since then, I have thought long and hard about the consequences of little actions, such as you describe in this article. Sometimes, it even used to paralyze me with fear, playing the “what-if” scenarios in my head. Fortunately, I’ve outgrown that tendency!

A counter-point that I have chosen to believe is that there is a “self-correcting” feature programmed into the Universe. That is to say, I believe that some things are just meant to be, and if we somehow inadvertently screw that up, the universe will move to fix itself. If that is really true, then the hero from the book wouldn’t have changed anything, another mosquito would have taken the place of the one he swatted, doing all the things the original mosquito was supposed to have done, thereby making the net effect of the killing very small.

What do you think?
.-= Jay Schryer´s last blog ..The Big Easy =-.

This was a beautifully written article and I loved reading it like I love reading all of your articles. Your inspiring prose points out that we can make a difference in the world and maybe even a profound difference. But just because we exist and make choices does not mean that we will actually make those profound differences. Most people do not. It’s a choice and most do not seem to make that choice in my opinion.

I like your last question as a challenge to make a profound difference and not necessarily the assumption that whatever difference I make will be profound. I could just go limping through life doing not much of anything and not too many people will care that I existed nor will I have left much of myself here as a result. I hope this makes sense.
.-= Stephen – Rat Race Trap´s last blog ..Mavis Karn’s Secret =-.