The Power of One

Most of us are aware of our relative inability to change anything in the world. Most of us have no power to speak of, few connections and no opportunities that would allow us to do something meaningful. What I will say now is counter-intuitive. Everything we do counts and everyone is important. It's counter-intuitive because it really doesn't feel that way and I get that. At the same time we have, these days, a body of scientific work that shows how ideas, news, information and viruses are propagated. When we analyze the data we find that, time and again, all these things move along connections that are relatively predictable and somewhat visible to our analysis but at the point where they appear to spin out of our ability to control them, they do not.

What happens in moments like that is that a single individual, network node or cell becomes a gateway to an entirely different part of the connected network and at that point we get a runaway effect. To get a little better grasp of what I am talking about read this review on Malcolm Gladwell's latest book and also check out what we know of superspreaders.

Beyond the downbeat nature of the two examples I've used lies a deeper connection: we all live in a mostly transparent, interconnected world. Even within the relative protected environment of The Hive what we say and how we say it affects many more people than just the ones who immediately see our posts or choose to directly engage with them. We have no idea what effect this has and what then happens to those who read what we write as a result.

The potential however is there and we all have the ability to change perceptions and affect experiences. It is a little sobering because it makes us realize just how responsible we are for people we may not even know. It should also be a little heartening to realize that people we don't even know also feel a little responsible for us. It is this sense of shared responsibility that makes us all part of the human family.

We may face unique problems. We may be isolated. We all, for sure, struggle with something. But here's proof that alone we aren't. We truly matter whether we know it or not.

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

We don't have to look very far to find positive examples of this effect.

In 1976 Terry Fox was a kid who liked to run and play basketball. He was no more special than any other human.
Then something terrible happened to Terry. He got cancer. He had to have his right leg amputated.
But Terry did not give up. He learned to play wheelchair basketball. He learned to run again with a prosthetic leg.
He also came up with the completely ridiculous plan to run across Canada to raise money for cancer research.

When Terry Fox started his Marathon of Hope, few people even knew who he was.
Today, the annual Terry Fox Run involves millions of participants in over 60 countries and is the largest one-day fundraiser for cancer research in the world.

That kid who liked to run and play basketball is now a national hero in Canada.
But Terry's dream didn't arise out of nowhere.
He wasn't born a great athlete. When he started high school he wasn't all that good at his first love--basketball--and only started cross country running to impress his high school basketball coach.
When he lost a leg to cancer, his idea to run across Canada didn't spring magically out of nowhere either. He was inspired to train to run long distance after reading about Dick Traum, the first person to complete the New York City Marathon with a prosthetic leg. He was inspired to raise money for cancer research after learning about how recent breakthroughs in cancer research had affected his own treatment and prognosis, and seeing how much work there was still to be done through his observations of other individuals undergoing their own battles with cancer who he encountered during his own stay in a cancer clinic.

We are all in this messy, wonderful, sometimes traumatic but also sometimes wonderful thing called life together. And like pebbles tossed into a lake, our actions big and small have ripple effects, both in our own lives, and in the world around us.

I find this encouraging. Because I see big problems in the world around me. And I don't see anything I can do to fix them. (In spite of being a person relatively wealthy in resources such as mental capacity, physical health, residence in an affluent country, etc.) But if I accept that I alone do not need to fix any of these problems. That all I need to do--all I can do--is my one tiny part. Then my tiny efforts have meaning (even when I cannot see any effect they are having in the moment in which I make them). Indeed, my efforts are all important! Because progress never happens in a vacuum. All progress is the result of all of us, collectively, working together. (And if I see some people out there who appear to me to be working against progress, that makes it all the more important for me to do my part, however tiny, to increase the forces of good in our world.)