Radiance…
We all know the concept of the ripple effect. We can all picture in our minds sometime in our childhood when we threw a rock out into a pond and watched as the water rippled away from that point of contact. We even know that our actions have effects on others. But to really think that many actions we take on any given day effect others is a lot to grasp. Not so much that each little action we take changes the whole course of history (or maybe it does, think there got to be a movie about that) but the fact of how interconnected we are is daunting and amazing.
This morning we all woke up late. I hopped out of bed and sounded the alarm! Everybody we are LATE! The effect was immediate from our 6 year old… She was very upset. She told me “Get your clothes on now! And no coffee for you!!!” My initial emotion was anger. Helen should not be talking to me like that. I was tired too and almost snapped back. But that dumb ripple effect… Then she would have been more upset and then we would be even later. We realized too that Helen’s principle was teaching class that day, so she was on high alert already. So if Helen is upset going into school that effects the teacher as well. And who knows Mrs. R, her principal, may have been a little nervous spending all day in Kindergarten (I know I would be shaking in my boots!). And so Helen, the normally bright and sunny student coming in thunderstorm mode may dissuade Mrs. R from ever taking on that challenge again!
So I decided to make chocolate milk for breakfast. Chocolate milk fixes a lot of things, especially emotional ones. I came upstairs with Chocolate milk… smiles all around… and we were off to school only 5 minutes late.
Can we choose how our pebble hits the water? Can we ever know what effects our actions have on others, especially two or three times removed? I don’t have a definitive answer, but I do know a few things. One, our actions make waves. We would like to think we make big waves, but usually in the grand scheme of things we all make pretty small waves. Two, many small actions are the real drivers of change. We tend to look at history as a series of large events, but that is mostly because it is a challenge to really see and document all of the little actions that manifest in one larger event.
Was it the fact that Rosa Parks stood up a bus that changed the course of history. Or the dozens of women who stayed up late that night making the leaflets that covered Montgomery, Alabama the day after her arrest as a call to action. Or the thousands of people who spent the next 381 days waking up knowing they would be walking that day to boycott the segregation of buses before integration occurred. Did a woman that woke up on a regular Tuesday know that her walk across town to clean houses or that went to work in a store know that her actions that day would help shape the future?
The third thing that I know about the ripple effect is that when we come together as a family, a team, or a community and we talk - we discover how our actions effect one another and how our future actions can be of benefit to the greater good. Each day we have that decision to make - how will we make waves today?
Written by~ Ross Cunningham