Every year several families in the area get together for a weekend campout at one of the nearby campgrounds. We usually take up almost an entire loop and the kids have a great time visiting with friends until all hours.
I like to ask high schoolers what plans they have for when they get out of high school. One particular girl said she wanted to ‘Change the World’. As she said this a garbage truck was going through the campground emptying the dumpsters. I pointed out to this girl that the garbage man is changing the world. Naturally she wasn’t too impressed with this response, but it reminded me that we all change the world.
In the movie Jurassic Park, Malcolm educates Ellie on the Butterfly effect wherein a “A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking and in Central Park you get rain instead of sunshine.”
A similar idea applies to changing the world. We all change the world by every action we take. Without the garbage man the dumpsters would overflow and the campground would be a stinking mess. No one would want to visit. We may get angry and think to ourselves, if this other person doesn’t care, why should we? Eventually everything is a mess.
Changing the world can come in many forms, there are those who are well known and those who quietly go about there job doing the best they can day in and day out. There are far more of the latter type of person than the former. We should appreciate them more. We should also remind ourselves that when we do a good job, no matter the task, we are changing the world to be a better place.