Impact

You can drop a stone into a pond in such a way that you cause very little disturbance, but it’s not easy, and down at the microscopic level it’s likely you’re disrupting some aspect of that equilibrium (even if it doesn’t seem like that’s the case from your macro-scale perspective).

We all have an impact on the world around us, the people in that world, and all the other things—living and non-living—with which we share reality.

The nature of that impact is worthy of our consideration, then, as it’s not something we can really get rid of, and all else being equal, wouldn’t it be more ideal to leave things better than we found them than the opposite?

That’s how I think about things, anyway, and it’s a guiding principle for everything I do.

I’m not always going to make perfect decisions, and sometimes I’ll behave badly even according to my own standards; that’s life. It sucks (especially in retrospect), but it’s life.

That said, it is possible to align ourselves with our beliefs and values so that almost always we’ll do things that we can be generally happy about; or bare-minimum, not ashamed of.