why bother?

A tip

I have, over the last few weeks, had rather a lot of conversations with people in their late twenties. Who seem to think they are ancient and their lives are almost over and they no longer have any potential to accomplish anything amazing in rest of their lives.

This has got rather irritating because the way they vent these feelings is to warn me that I will, in four to six years, feel the same way.

Maybe I will.

But maybe I won't. Now, this might seem to be a rather know-it-all attitude from a 22 year old, but I have reasons for saying this.

So...I said I had a tip. What is it?

It is something I learned a while ago. Something that was imprinted in me. Something both enlightening, uplifting, and perhaps sometimes discouraging-- if you want it to be.

You will most likely not change the world in any large recognisable sense. It is highly unlikely that you will leave a mark on the Earth that any self-respecting Martian would deem worth checking out from her little pink spaceplane.

This does not mean, however, that you should give up and live on chocolate pudding while watching pay-per-view Bond films for the rest of your life. The world is not small, the world is not simple. Just because you can't change everything or even some of the things you most want to, you can still change a few crucial corners. Amongst the teeming masses of people, there are some that need you-- and not always in the ways you expect. Hidden in the vastness of everything, the details need you.

I learnt this by looking out from a hillside in the darkness. I was in a quarry, facing away from the naked landscape of crumbled stones and dust, looking out to the land below. All across the valleys and surrounding hills, thousands of little shacks lay under the shroud of darkness, all emitting only a tiny point of light from a lantern or a bulb surreptitiously linked to a passing overhead wire. There were so many lights. And each one representing a home most likely in need of more warmth, more food, more money, more clean water, more opportunity.

One light came from a family I had met that day. I was with a group building houses in the neighborhood for families identified by the local church as particularly in need of a warm shelter. We had given the family the new house, complete with a shiny front door and windows earlier that day, the mother tearing up as the father accepted the keys. She had told us all that she hoped her kids would grow up to be like us.

Details-- so many little things to remember. Little seconds filled with words and strange, heavy emotions. One family. Five children, two parents. In one town in one province. In only one country in our one world.

Only one light among all those thousands. One small detail. Thousands more lights still in need.

Why bother going? Can one light provide enough of a reason?