Many of us want results now and aren’t patient enough to wait. However, I’ve found that the most significant accomplishments in life require a long-term mindset and effort.
Working hard is important, but it’s not about killing yourself to do something faster, it’s about whether you show up every single day in those little moments when nobody is watching. That’s where greatness is found. Things material and things immaterial are moved, shaped, influenced by little things surrounding. If, as it has been said, we are largely the creatures of circumstances–then how can we be indifferent to those things that harm us, or negligent of those that make for our growth and development?
That which modifies, counteracts, and influences the more positive and powerful things of the present, as they surround us and make us know of their presence by their constant contact are the little and yet large things of the past. Our names connect us with generations that have ceased to live, and yet who live in us far more than we are willing to admit. Our speech perpetuates a language replete with thoughts, opinions, ideas, not our own in originality – ours only by heredity. Try to escape it as we may, the shadow or the light of the past shaped us in the life of the present. Yet we can not mourn this, or wish our former steps and learnings to be different.
We can come to understand them and grow from those seeds planted long ago. Yes our garden is the present moment, but our seeds and weeds were planted in earlier times.
Because of the cosmopolitan spirit of our age, it is no uncommon thing for an East Indian student to find his way into an Anglo-Saxon civilization; or a Japanese to find a home and a companion in an American Commonwealth. The effect of study, travel, religion, social customs may harmonize the extremes of a world-wide origin and of a long distant past with the life and thought and feeling of the present. Yet the influence of the past, whatever the surroundings of the present may be, whether we will it or not – has its decided effect upon the life of today; for it is in the blood, in the brain, in the heart. Change of dress, change of speech, change of religion even, adoption of new methods of domestic comfort and business life, preference for different means and measures for human happiness will not utterly cut us off from the influence of the long line of deeds, words, and thoughts, born and nurtured in the ages of the past.
So lets us grow from our small moments in large ways. Life is made up of little things. It is very rarely that an occasion is offered for doing a greatness at once. True greatness consists in being great in little things on a common basis
Peace and Love, Jim
