Real life is a series of stories within stories.
There’s the story of today: we get up to tackle our daily tasks: washing dishes, writing that report, getting kids out the door to the school bus, paying bills, mowing the lawn, leading the sales meeting, cooking meals … whatever the tasks are that you do everyday.
Sometimes all of these tasks just get taken care of with no problems. Sometimes we run into trouble because we’re out of dish soap, we haven’t got the info we need to finish the repot, the kids wouldn’t just get up and get dressed, the checking account is woefully short, the lawn mower won’t crank, the sales meeting got cancelled, and dinner will be delayed because you’re missing that one very important ingredient.
Sometimes the problem is us … everything would work out just fine if we would just simply get off our phone, turn off the movie, put down the book, or simply drag ourselves out of bed and get our chores done!
So depending on how it all finally got worked out, today’s story will have a happy or sad ending.
Then there’s the story of this week: where a happy or sad ending will generally depend on how many good or bad days we had and how that balanced out. The monthly story will depend on how those weeks went. Then the years will depend on the months. Enough years pile up and a lifetime has been lived …. did it end happily or sadly?
But that’s just one individual’s story.
Expand that out to their family’s story, daily, weekly, monthly ….
Then a whole community … a state … a country … a continent … the whole world!
This is why all of the self help gurus will tell you that those tiny little daily habits matter so much. The law of compounding interest applies to lots more than just money.
Small correct choices and actions done consistently over time will reap good consequences, resulting in happy endings to our stories.
Neglecting and avoiding responsibilities and engaging in harmful activities, again and again over time will reap bad consequences, resulting in sad endings to our stories.
The happy or sad stories we live out individually will affect the stories we live out in our families, which will affect the stories lived out in our communities. Then multiply all that by the numbers of individual and family stories that are also influencing the communities and is easy to understand why our world is such a hot mess! I suppose it’s kind of a miracle that our society has done as well as it has up till now!
So next time we’re tempted to excuse ourselves for the missteps we make, and we tell ourselves, It won’t matter. This is only affecting me., take a moment to reconsider … we truly do affect the world around us!
Thank you.😊