"Little ol' me? You're saying I can change the world--or even just my small corner of it?"
Well, yes. After all, each of us has already made a difference.
Raising a child to be "a good person."
Bringing home a paycheck, especially doing work that holds little intrinsic meaning.
Voting.
Saying a kind word to a stranger.
These are contributions. They can even be downright heroic.
Each and every one of us has the capacity to make the most fundamental contribution of all: showing up as ourselves, authentically, with the richness of our life experiences.
A few years ago, I met a woman who was in her 80s. Her beloved husband had died years before, but the memory was fresh. As we spoke, once in a while she'd glance at a large portrait of him that graced the wall of her living room.
"Right after Bob died, a friend came over and sat next to me," she told me. "She put her hand gently on my knee and began to speak. In my stupor, some of the words sounded familiar. And then it came to me: She was trying to counsel me, using techniques I knew she'd learned one summer in the church basement. I had to ask her to leave."
"Then another friend came to visit," she continued. "She was younger than I, but her husband had died a couple of years earlier. She just sat with me, saying nothing."
A long pause as she remembered that day.
"That was what the doctor ordered. She was my proof that I could survive this. Her very being was evidence."
It may seem a small thing, comforting a grieving friend. What does it have to do with the high ideals and historic matters we've been talking about? Being present for family, friends, and neighbors usually isn't counted as "voluntarism" or being "in service." Surely it doesn't qualify as changing the world.
But when you really stop and think about it, don't those seemingly small moments contribute to creating the kind of world you want to live in?
On the societal scale, these acts of personal connection are direct human-to-human services of such magnitude that would cost governments billions to provide (if they even could).
Taken together with the more obvious forms of voluntary deeds and philanthropy, such individual initiative creates an invisible economy so large that futurist Alvin Toffler has described it as the hidden half of the world's wealth.
"I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big successes," wrote William James more than a century ago. "I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water."
We can still aspire to great things and make big plans. I'm only asking that we also pause just long enough to notice what we usually call small things--the everyday ways each of us shapes our own corner of the world. A poster from some kids, two widows sharing silence, a conversation with a friend, a remark to a colleague, a question in a meeting.
"Small things" influence the world more than we know.