So I'm back at this again. I guess it is important to me. A whole lot of my motivation around career and personal life has been around whether I made a difference. I suppose one could argue that the mere fact of my existence requires a positive answer, but you know that's not what I am digging at.
The line of thinking goes something like, so what? There are some 6 billion of you. What possible difference can one in six billion make? Then I think about Sirhan. Without him there might have been some very interesting differences in how things worked out in the last four decades, unless, of course, the regression to the mean is so powerful as to damp out what might have been with RFK.
But still, really? I am but a mote in Brownian motion. When that's burned out who will give a crap? Given what I believe, I certainly won't. Which takes me back to the starting point again.
Inevitably where I net out is where I did in conversation with one of you some months ago. The only thing that I can hope to have done is to have made small differences along the way, just as some along the way have made them for me as I have written about them here. And there are some.
I keep going back to my Sheldon Kopp lines. The relevant one today: "We have only ourselves, and one another. That may not be much, but that's all there is."
So if we do make a difference to one another along the way, that may be the very best we can do.
I can be sorry for having failed to make as much of a difference as I might have wished for my sons, but there's not much to be done about it now. I did what I knew how. For a few for whom I may not have been the best of friends all of the time, there's no going back to repair those. It is what it is.
Is it significant? Obviously to me in some way or I wouldn't gnaw at it. Is it significant in some larger context? Nope. Nada. Sorry mr. 1/6,000,000,000th.
The line of thinking goes something like, so what? There are some 6 billion of you. What possible difference can one in six billion make? Then I think about Sirhan. Without him there might have been some very interesting differences in how things worked out in the last four decades, unless, of course, the regression to the mean is so powerful as to damp out what might have been with RFK.
But still, really? I am but a mote in Brownian motion. When that's burned out who will give a crap? Given what I believe, I certainly won't. Which takes me back to the starting point again.
Inevitably where I net out is where I did in conversation with one of you some months ago. The only thing that I can hope to have done is to have made small differences along the way, just as some along the way have made them for me as I have written about them here. And there are some.
I keep going back to my Sheldon Kopp lines. The relevant one today: "We have only ourselves, and one another. That may not be much, but that's all there is."
So if we do make a difference to one another along the way, that may be the very best we can do.
I can be sorry for having failed to make as much of a difference as I might have wished for my sons, but there's not much to be done about it now. I did what I knew how. For a few for whom I may not have been the best of friends all of the time, there's no going back to repair those. It is what it is.
Is it significant? Obviously to me in some way or I wouldn't gnaw at it. Is it significant in some larger context? Nope. Nada. Sorry mr. 1/6,000,000,000th.
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