Changing the World
When I was in my early twenties, I wanted to change the world. I had read that one person alone can make an enormous impact and I wanted to make a positive one. This, however, is a daunting prospect for someone who is still figuring who they are and what makes them happy. After a couple of years of failing to figure out how I was going to do this, I realized that sometimes you have to start small. By being a good person to strangers and friends, I was affecting the world around me. In turn, they were affecting the world around them. If everyone realizes that they can make a difference just by being a good person (kind, helpful, accepting), it will eventually trickle down. We have to start somewhere if we want to see less unbelievable violence when we read and watch the news. We need to do something about the hatred and bloodshed that is infultraiting our societies (not only across the world - I am mainly thinking of the horrors that happened in the Amish school 2 days ago). How can we change this? We need to combat it by being kind and positive in our daily lives! This is an excellent starting point.
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I think we can all relate to
I think we can all relate to your 'change the world' phase. It's a healthy albeit quite painful stage of developing care for the world. It's a well-intentioned attitude, but often fueled by anger and outrage, which then tend to create hasty and sometimes violent reaction instead of skillful response.
To me the key word in your post is accepting. A typical response to the suggestion of radical acceptance goes something like, "What? Accept the pollution, environmental degradation, militarization, corporate domination of the world? Why would I ever do that?".
The simple truth in what you've suggested here is infinitely more powerful than any greenpeace operation, corporate boycott or shock/dispair oriented culture jamming publication. But that just has to be realized in due time, through whatever internal and external struggles that may arise.
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Yes you are affecting the
Yes you are affecting the world around you...
I read that leadership is ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Similarly you are saying that every ordinary person can impact the world around them by doing, not by talking about it, but by doing some ordinary action. And there would be extraordinary results.
Thanks for the post.
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Oh Jodi. What a wonderful
Oh Jodi. What a wonderful thing to read. It sounds too easy, so I think we dismiss the importance of the wisdom you have just shared. But the thing is that is all we can really do. Our own actions really are the only ones we have any control over. And I even hesitate to use the word control, because if we are really tuned in, we are not actually controlling anything - we are simply allowing something beautiful to happen.