Never Walked In High Heels

Not long ago I sent out an email asking for help regarding a dilemma I was facing. Most people emailed me back offering suggestions or saying that they were stumped, except for one woman who was in my masters program last year. She wrote me the following:

“I can appreciate what you are going to do, but it’s only going to result in costing you more money. You’re better off quitting while you are ahead. After all, you can’t change the world, so why do damage to yourself while trying?”

I realize, of course, that no single person can change the world. Indeed it is arrogant to think otherwise. The economic philosopher F.A Hayek once wrote “Nothing has brought as much hell on earth as people trying to make it a paradise.” And indeed, my generation is particularly culpable of running around attempting to justify the action(s) of that behavior by persuading ourselves that if only this one thing was different the world would be exactly as it ought to be.

But I can save someone’s world, even if it is my own. By nature, I am not particularly a small-scale thinker. When most people in college were volunteering to teach a single school child how to read, I quickly found myself working in three different ESL classrooms. The truth is I was never very effective in any of them because I was spread out so thin

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This, I suppose, is the deity of human interaction, because to change the world simply means to change the world of one individual. Simply teaching a child how to do long division radically changes his world. And when that individual’s world has changed, he is able to press on and teach someone else the same skills which you have taught him. Thus you have greatly altered not the child’s world, but those he taught as well.

Metaphysics talks about a problem which is briefly titled “Possible Worlds”. The idea, though somewhat strange, is rather simple. In this world, my nail polish is bright red, but there are a million possible worlds out there which we may or may not be aware of in which my polish is bright green, purple, orange, or even black. Simply because we are not aware of these possible worlds in our own world does not mean that a world where I have chosen to paint my nails black, does not exist. It just means that in this world, we are not aware of it. When we take the time to touch each other’s lives, and to improve the world that we are aware of, we give each other glimpses of what better worlds, that is what possible worlds, are out there.

The family of a girlfriend of mine decided over the course of about ten years to adopt eight Russian children, all of them related in various forms. When I tell this story, particularly to people in the UK, I often get a comment that my friend’s family “over-adopted” and thus most likely spread themselves so thin that they will never be able to take care of all of those children adequately. It’s true, those children will not have as much individualized attention from their parents as an only child living under the same conditions. I was appalled when someone said “What are they trying to do, adopt all of Russia? Change the entire problem? The entire orphan problem?” No family in their right mind is ever that arrogant.

What they did try to do was change the world for eight Russian children who would otherwise be facing a bleak existence separated from their siblings in orphanages spread out across a massive country. And the parents themselves say that as much they managed to changed the world for their children. But their children have enhanced their world. That’s the way that great ideas work. Someone who improves the world of someone else in need will surely become the recipient of a changed world. And, unlike my friend who insists otherwise, perhaps will so much easier say that worlds, when looked at on an individual level, are much easier to say than we might think.