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You Change The World (Whether You Like It Or Not)

Not long ago, I was having a conversation about how messed up the world is. It is pretty messed up, but that is a topic for another post. During the conversation, I was met with a phrase that far too many people actually believe. "You can't change the world."

It wrong to think that one person cannot change the world, because every person does change the world. Granted, not everyone changes the world to the same degree or in a positive way, but everyone has an effect on their surroundings. They have an effect on the people they come into contact with. They have an effect in what they create, what they destroy, even what they decide not to do.

Every moment is spent making choices. Whether it is choosing what to do with our lives or choosing to literally take a step forward. Choosing to wait a minute to take that next step changes the timing with which you do everything that follows. And since what you do and when you do it affects anyone and everything else's future that you come into contact with after you do it and what choices those people make based on your interaction affect the people they come into contact with and so on from person to person, even a decision as perceivably small as choosing to step forward has an impact on how the future looks when it becomes history. This is often referred to as the butterfly effect.

Whether or not you believe in souls and an afterlife, what you do in the life that you know of now will continue to impact the world, and perhaps the universe and who knows what else beyond that, for whatever we can conceivably call forever. So in a real sense we all do live forever. I think it is a very beautiful thing.

So when speaking about changing the world, it is not about whether or not you have the ability to change the world. You, I, and everyone else necessarily does change the world. The proper consideration, rather, is how and to what extent do you want to change the world.

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