My friend Steve and I were coming home from a White Sox versus Tigers game at old Comiskey Park. It was a warm July night during our college years. He had a summer job at the Post Office, an early shift, and a sleepless night and morning at a party he hosted.
By the time we left the stadium, he’d been awake for almost 48 hours.
I asked him if he was alert enough to drive, but he pooh-poohed my concerns. On the return trip, I noticed his car began to weave into another lane. I turned toward him. His eyes were closed. With one hand, I grabbed the steering wheel, and shook him with the other as I got the vehicle under control.
What if?
What if we died in a crash? Humanity would have lost Steve’s future as a genetic researcher of international fame who contributed to the human genome project. Of course, no one could have predicted that in 1967.
Everyone matters.
I became a clinical psychologist, a husband, a father, and a grandfather. But the accident might have ended my future, with toddlers and grandkids disappearing without lives they were never given.
My wife, whom I met a few years later, likely would have married and produced different youngsters and grandchildren. Their impact on the planet vanished because I survived the close call.
Those young ones were among an endless number of children who never were. I would have been one had my father returned from World War II thirty days after he did.
History only records what occurs, and then just part of the entire story. We cannot know the totality of our influence on others once we depart.
Yet we might have children or grandchildren who make their mark because of us. We might have nudged friends or their offspring and put our thumb on their posterity.
Van Gogh, for example, never sold a painting and had to be supported by his brother. The artist was hospitalized for psychiatric treatment and committed suicide at age 37. Most of us experience neither his profound desperation nor the ability to give birth to art that moves some to tears.
We have ways to revise and improve the world, small or large. Planting a garden, teaching, and attending a library board meeting come to mind. Loving another and seeing them in a way no one else does. Helping those in need, making charitable donations, and emigrating to a land offering multiple generations a better life.
In United States history, one cannot ignore the founders’ gift to all of us, and the slow refinement of the law produced by some of those who succeeded them.
As I waited to cross the street during college, a young lady traveled the same path a step to my right. She was lost in her conversation with a friend, unaware of the red light we faced. She entered the crosswalk in front of a speeding car. I grabbed her arm and pulled her back.
She was stunned and did not realize what had happened until later. Did she become a nurse, a nun, an architect, a physician, or a legislator?
Failing to learn her lesson, would she have walked into traffic again and been harmed or killed? Might this woman have touched one life, 100, or all those on the planet?
We live in a world of possibilities, but a troubled time. A single life might alter things, and the difference can be immense.
Think of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Beethoven, the Buddha, Abe Lincoln, Hannah Arendt, Moses, Margaret Atwood, Mohammed, Jesus, Virginia Wolfe, Jackie Robinson, Ernest Hemingway, Homer, Rembrandt, Marie Curie, John Lewis, Indira Gandhi, and many others.
Do not diminish your potential to impact the world. You cannot know whether your presence sets the Earth forward or backward. Do not say your existence makes no difference.
Live as if it makes all the difference.
You never know.
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The paintings of Vincent van Gogh are sourced from Wikiart.org/ The first is Irises (1889), and the second is Sower at Sunset (1888). Finally, the artist’s The Starry Night (1889).
