When I was a little boy, there was not much for us anywhere. We lived very small but very hopeful lives. In my family we talked of what could be and how we could be the ones to make it so. The difference between believing it can be and making it so, is belief and hope. By the time I was twenty, the world had changed. There was more transportation; there was more contact in the world. Not like today, but more than we had had at that time. We dreamed of being able to get from one continent to another in a matter of minutes. We dreamed of moving ourselves around the world and around the universe in days, and that happened. Nothing we’ve dreamed of hasn’t happened, except for people finding enough happiness in themselves, not to have to take happiness away from someone else.
When one thinks of world peace, one thinks of it in the abstract, because it isn’t something we ever believe to be something we can touch and make tangible. We can go as small as the atom, but we cannot go as big as the world. The atom being the smallest part of all of us and of the earth - that is where we need to begin. Start small. Don’t think so big all the time. No wonder there sometimes seems to be any hope of permanent change in the world. Permanent freedom. Permanent help to those who need it. It is not that we don’t think big enough. It is that we think too big. Think smaller. Start on a local level, start in your own family. Start where you know you can make a difference, and then move up. When people see you can make a difference, they will call on you to do so with hope in their hearts that something is about to be different. Something is about to be better for them. That hope and belief alone generate enough power to make it impossible for it not to be successful.
We all have this ability; we all have this power. Don’t think beyond just doing what needs to be done. And what needs to be done now is for people to see the world differently. Perhaps as a series of neighborhoods, rather than such an overwhelming project. One neighborhood at a time is all it takes. If that seems overly optimistic, look at it this way: When a marathon runner takes on a step in a race, it is only a step in a race. It is not an entire mile at a time. But with taking every step one by one, he finishes the race. And for most, it is not about winning the race, but finishing it. For in the finishing, is the winning. And it is the same, whether you are running a marathon or trying to improve the world.
What happened on September 11th was so devastating to those it touched that no one thought it was surmountable. One thought the wreckage would stay forever, and that the grief would be unbearable forever. But one by one, people picked up the pieces – at Ground Zero or in their own families, or in their own hearts. People helped each other through clearing out the wreckage one crumbled piece of an old life at a time, be it a dream, a family, or a building. Everything is surmountable. Everything can be overcome. Everything can be improved upon. This is the mission of everyone who is unhappy with any aspect of the world. How would you see it better? How would you run it better? Or would you just let it run itself, and hope for the world to not need so much control over everything? At what point do we stop and say, everything is fine now, I can enjoy the world like this? At what point is everything fine? Never. Because the world is different to everyone. Everyone lives and believes differently. It is a very different experience for a beggar on the street than the stockbroker who steps over him in the morning. So, how do we change the world? We change our own. We look at our own world and see what we would want to fix, and go after that goal. You never know how many other lives you can improve when you make the effort to improve your own. You never know how many worlds you can change, by changing your own.
