Thursday, September 26, 2013

Joyful Process

I'm feeling extremely grateful today for the simple reality of how things happen! I mean by that the process that allows - no, compels! - each of us to be changing ourselves and the world, constantly, with our every choice and action.

Today, I am so very aware, that everything I do - that any of us does - has an immediate and lasting effect on us and our world. It's not big and complex things I'm thinking about. It's being aware that when I chose a direction, then take a single step, that it has an effect. If I think of someone, it changes me, and then to pick up the phone and call, or not call ... there is change, effect. If I want to lose weight and eat a little less, it has an effect. No, I don't become instantly fit, but my body responds in perfect proportions to my action. And when I read, that changes me, just a little bit, and when I read again the next day, I'm changed a little more.

In particular, I'm feeling the reality that, though it can sometimes seem and feel dauntingly difficult to produce the change we want, in fact, every little act has its effects. Every act reverberates through all the areas of our lives, a series of vibrations, mingling with, sometimes overwhelmed by others, but always there, part of that whole that is the ever-present moment we live in.

My walking and thinking change me. The choices I make while I work: the tasks I accomplish or don't, the calls I return and those I don't - they affect me and they affect those I work with, for good and bad. The person who lets me cut into traffic affects me, as does the one who blasts his horn. The smiles change me, and the glares and frowns.

Every day, everything about me, and about you and the rest of the world, changes under the influence of tiny choices, acts, movements, thoughts. These lead to horrors and they lead to wonderful things as well.

The changes aren't always discernible; mostly, they are not. It can take hundreds or millions of them, cumulatively, to create what we might recognize as a substantial, a significant change. But to me, today, that's all part of the wonder of it: that I inch in one direction one moment, and back again the next, that it's so constant and fluid, but so real. That I'm required to hold to a thing, or to come back to it, again and again, before it will rise to a threshold of ... of what? Tipping a balance, deciding a question, achieving a goal, concluding a thought ... being a friendship, standing for something, lasting, overcoming inertia, attaining weight and presence.

But, despite all this, each of these things is made up of those component moments and choices and of the tiniest acts. And so each one of those tiny things matters. And for some reason - today - this reality fills me with joy.

We are Change Agents, Change Machines, and isn't that miraculous and wonderful? Miraculous in the sense that it seems beyond comprehension to be such, to have such power. But also the antithesis of miraculous in that it defines our every moment of life.

 

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