Do you realize that everything that you do, absolutely everything is affecting the rest of the world? And do you also realize that there is a lot of people involved in all that you do everyday, even the food you eat or the clothes you wear?
When you wake up in the morning and you make yourself a cup of coffee, have you ever thought of how many people have been involved in the process of bringing that coffee to you? Let’s think for a moment...
Say you are drinking Colombian coffee. Someone in Colombia, years ago, decided to be in the business of harvesting coffee seeds. They invested in a piece of land, got some coffee seeds, hired a group of people to plant and water the seeds, waited until the plant was ripen, then harvested them, collected the bags of coffee and sent them to be roasted and ground.
The ground coffee was then sent to your town be distributed by, your favorite store, where you finally bought it.
Now, the cup where you are drinking your coffee from was made by a person that also invested time and creativity. What about the water that you use for that coffee? There were a lot of people involved in that process too. The electricity that you use to warm up your drink involves many people and many choices.
This is just one small example that shows that we need to be aware of our connection to the rest of the world, and start developing a sense of gratitude for all the people that have made possible for us to live the way we live today.
We also need to be aware that we affect people around us by the way we act. No matter what your religious beliefs are, there is a real connection between human beings, and we have the power to improve this connection. Let me show you another example...
My wife used to work with small children, and she conducted a learning game for them to be aware of how their actions, positive or negative, would affect their families, friends and even people they never met.
She would create a circle where the kids would write an action that actually happened in their young lives:
“ I woke up this morning, had a fight with my sister, and I hit her”
then my wife would create a bigger circle that would include the first one, where the kids would write the immediate reaction to the first action:
“My mother got very upset and left home for work without finishing her breakfast”.
Then there was another bigger circle around the second one to write the reaction of the mother’s upset:
“My mother drove to work in a bad mood, cut someone off and made another person angry”
The circles would go on and on, and I know that you are getting the picture by now...
If we reverse the events, and we choose to be kind to, say, the lady that is taking our order in a restaurant, we are altering this person’s day in a positive way. This is a wave that will affect this person’s immediate community, but eventually will affect the rest of the world. If more of us start changing our attitudes for the best, we will see a change in this planet.
With social networks like Facebook and Twitter, we can see the results of our actions and words immediately, when we write a nice message for someone we care for, and other people that we don’t even know, react to this message in a matter of seconds. Then we receive this nice message later on by someone that we never knew was connected to the first person we wrote this message for.
The other day I received a message from my niece that lives in Paris. She wrote:
“For this thanksgiving day we should be aware of the things we are thankful for”
and I wrote to her:
“I am thankful for having you in my life”.
A few minutes later, some of her friends in France started to write to her with beautiful sentiments that were triggered by these two comments.
With this we should realize the power of our owns words and attitudes, that spreads all over the world by the Internet.
After hearing my speech, I hope you are convinced that you can change other people’s behavior by your actions, your comments, even your facial expressions, but specially by your attitude. You can definitively affect the world!
