The Unknown Monk
Adam Quirk
Changing yourself is inevitable. But what about changing the world?
Time for another quote. This one is attributed on the Internet to "Unknown Monk, circa 1300 AD" but that origin is highly unlikely considering the content. I don't care at all who said it, because it holds a lot of meaning for me.
“When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.
I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation.
When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn’t change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.
Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.”
The point being, that to solve big problems in life, and achieve big social goals, you don't need to be Elon Musk or Barack Obama.
Start small, improve the lives of your close circle. The theory of compounding interest spreads that change out into the world.
World peace is a massive, lofty goal. To be honest, it seems unlikely in our current situation. But maybe the problem is that we've been thinking about it wrong. Instead of world peace, what if we decided to try to achieve inner peace? And if we could somehow do that, try to achieve family peace. And then we try to achieve Bloomington peace.
There are actual examples of this sort of bottom-up approach working. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr come to mind. One person doing good things at a very small scale can lead to massive societal change.