The three commercials I’ve written about this week don’t share all that much in common. The companies work in different industries and the products they create do not all compete against each other. However, the general message is similar - if you look at the world and respond to it, your life can really become something significant.
It doesn't sound like much - look and respond. But how often do we really do this? The tricky part is that it is so easy to do one or the other - we see something but pretend we don't, for example, or we respond to a question without truly considering what is being asked of us. Doing both is sometimes difficult, even if we aren't being asked to do all that much, but I've always found doing so to be very rewarding.
The times I look back on and consider to be my most significant all involve doing these two things together - looking at the world and responding to it. These significant times include mundane everyday moments when I simply lent a hand to someone who needed it. They also include more unusual moments when I encountered a new situation, took in all the information I could, and made the best possible decision. The common thread in these is the simple, repeated process - looking at the world and responding to it.
The only unexpected thing I realized when I looked back is how I used to do this almost entirely by accident. Looking and responding - when I did this in the past, it was never something I meant to do. It was never part of a plan or an agenda or a life philosophy. And the many forgettable or irrelevant experiences of my past often came about because I failed to do it, I failed to look and respond, opting instead to do just one, the other, or perhaps even neither.
When did this change? When did I change from someone who stumbled into significance to someone who really understood how my own approach created significance? I think it changed right around the time my mom died. I think this is the one thing I took away from all the thinking and feeling and talking and experiencing of that time three years ago - there was a lot of difficulty that would have been impossible to handle had I not so frequently accepted the circumstances around me and responded to those circumstances in the best way I could. That doesn't make any hard thing easy, of course, but I think the way forward in a difficult time is to make a habit of looking at the world and responding to it. And it isn't good enough to settle for doing this every once in a while, either. For me, the key now is to put myself in situations where I am challenged to do this all the time.
Walking down the street and thinking – oh, look, hopscotch, it would be fun to play, I would feel so young! – and then just continuing to walk by... this kind of thinking shouldn't cut it for anyone. And yet, when I pay close attention to others, it seems like the norm is to continue walking right on by. I think this is a mistake. What I've come to realize is that much of life is about that first moment when you notice the squares and you wonder about jumping in. Do you trust your instincts? Or do you look around to see what lines others are toeing?
When I feel that stir, when I sense that inner acknowledgement of what I see and recognize how I can get involved, I think I need to respond by jumping in with both feet. That might isolate me at times, might leave me with two feet firmly planted on the wrong side of the line, but I think it's a small price to pay for looking and responding. When I get to that point where I see the world around me and respond to every small part of it, that's the point when I really start to create, that's the point when the lines start to get a little blurry, and that's the point when all the loss and misery and difficulty starts to make a little more sense to me.
I don't think the how or the where or the what really matters here - looking and responding is going to work a little differently for everyone. I could point at myself and say you should write or you should bike or you should volunteer at a hospice or whatever but I don't think the specifics matter. The details should be different for everyone. I think it just matters to do two things, look and respond, just do those two things, and remember that though this might seem like a small step, to simply look and respond, it can be the smallest steps that take us over the biggest thresholds.
