Giving Soulfood #29

To make a difference in someone’s life, you don’t have to be brilliant, rich, beautiful or perfect. You just have to care.

Mandy Hale

Making a difference. This is the one thing that we all do, whether consciously or unconsciously. We live in an ecosystem which naturally also means that all our actions will affect someone else in one way or another.

When we start thinking about it this way, then I guess it would be reasonable to assume that we all want to leave a positive impact on someone else’s lives.

In fact, we all try to do that in one way or another. From little things like helping your friend carry things, to listening to them vent when they need to, to the larger scale things like caring for another community via community service, we all aim to leave a positive impact wherever we can.

But sometimes, it’s easy to get caught up in all that and start comparing yourself to others. You start thinking about whether or not you’re doing as much as that other volunteer. You start thinking about whether there is more that other people you’re doing that you’re not. You start thinking about whether you can pump in more financial resources to help whichever cause. Sometimes, you might even think about whether you can commit to yet another cause because your friend might be supporting more causes than you. The list goes on!

But really, do we really have to care so much about all that? Ultimately, all we want to do is to make a difference right? So does it really matter who is doing a little more or a little less?

Besides, this whole concept of more or less has to do with the concept of relativity. You might think that for every bit of effort you are putting in, there are so many people doing so much more. Conversely, I can also argue that for every bit of effort you’re putting in, there will be even more people doing even less.

Perhaps if I paint you a scenario. A rich man donates $100 to a charitable organization, while a poor man donates $10. Who has donated more? On surface value, we might be inclined to say that the rich man has donated more money than the poor man, but what if I told you that the rich man had millions to his name but the poor man only had that $10?

So you see, more or less, that’s completely a concept of relativity. We all have our own timelines in life, things will happen at their own pace, so why worry so much about something we cannot control?

TLDR: To make a difference, you just have to care enough to do something, because sometimes the smallest of actions can have the greatest impact.