28 May Is it so hard to care about others too? (JOHN-PAUL FLINTOFF)
The Victorian artist and writer Οhm Eman once asked why we give medals to people who, in a moment and without much thought, save somebody’s life, but we give no medal to people who devote years to bringing up a child.
Even the mundane can acquire grandeur if it’s held in a wider perspective. A researcher once asked men working with stone what they were doing. One said his job was to square off the stones and move them. Another said he was working to provide for his wife and children. A third, while conscious that he was doing both those things, said he was building a magnificent cathedral, for people to worship in long after he’d gone. Each of them was doing great work. but only one recognized how great it was. We can even impose a kind of grandeur on everyday parenting, of the sort Ens described, if we see it as the work of a good ancestor, striving to pass on the best of our distant forebears to people as yet unborn.
Every attitude we assume, every word we utter, and every act we undertake establishes us in relation to others. We may be alone in the realms of our private thoughts, perceptions and feelings, but the world we want to change consists of other people.
And this gives us an important clue as to where we might find the meaning we are looking for in helping others. Because if we are not doing that, we are still pursuing narrowly selfish interests.
How to change the world
John-Paul Flintoff
