[Elspode]

Once upon a time, I would have tossed this out here under a subject like Creative Half-Assed Ravings. However, since it has relative relevance to a previous topic, I'll put it here. This is what will appear in my monthly President's Letter in the Heartland Spiritual Alliance's monthly newsletter for December of 2005. Please wrap all stones and squishy thrown objects in tissue for easy identification and disposal...

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A couple of months ago, I found in my mailbox a completely unexpected and most pleasant surprise. It was a letter and some photos from a girl I had dated when I was a senior in high school, back in the dim recesses of 1974. Since receiving that letter, Liz had I have had an occasional correspondence via email, catching up on the 30-plus intervening years, sharing our family stories and talking about the directions our lives have taken. What I have found out about Liz has given me to pondering a bit. When she and I were dating, I was actively involved in our high school theater department as the light crew chief, doing all the stage lighting work for our various productions. Liz worked with me, and she stayed with it after I left high school (and our relationship) behind. I remember hearing later that she worked at Worlds of Fun for a couple of seasons doing lighting for their shows, and then moved back to California, but that was all I really knew.

In our infrequent emails, she told me that she had just retired from a 25-year career as a lighting designer in the Los Angeles theater scene. She was, in fact, one of the premier lighting designers in the country by the time she burned out on it, having travelled most of the United States and some of Europe in the process. Her resume would make most light tech's eyes bug out and cause legitimate theater tech wannabees to sob with envy. In the process, she had worked with several now well-known actors and actresses, and is in fact now the sister in law of a very well known pop culture icon by dint of her marriage to her husband Scott, whom she met in the business while on long road trips, paying their dues.

The newfound knowledge of Liz's admirable success started me thinking about how little we understand how our lives and our actions change the universe in which we live. 30 years ago, I taught a skinny youngster how to set up light rigs and run a monstrous old spotlight and rheostat-driven lighting board. She took that knowledge and turned it into an award-winning career in both college and the real world. In turn, her lighting realizations undoubtedly moved others to ponder their own lives and insights, perhaps bringing more season ticket purchases or donations to a struggling ballet company, which would in turn allow a young dancer to sustain themselves long enough to launch a career that would someday inspire a little girl to decide to make her career as a teacher of the Arts...and so on and so on.

*My* part in the above postulations is essentially nothing. I needed some help in 1974, and I recruited my then-girlfriend to help me. Heck, my original motivation was, likely as not, to find another way to spend time with her without being watched over by parents...nudge, nudge; wink, wink. Whatever the case, a sequence of events was set in motion that, 30 years later, has in all likelihood affected many lives and ways of thinking. Indeed, after 25 years of being a lighting designer, Liz was so burned out that she has now turned to nursing, and in another year she will begin to intimately touch the lives of thousands whom she will serve as an RN. It might even be said, then, that the sequence of events that was set in motion so many years ago which resulted in Liz's career burnout was impetus for her new career as well, and so those who will be affected by her nursing are secondary beneficiaries of her first career.

So why am I telling you this? Why am I waxing philosophical about some personal nostalgia that you could probably care less about? I do because my recent experience is but a small example of the enormous potential effect each and every one of us has on Existence. Sure, we probably understand that professional educators or athletic role models or other significant and prominent persons have such an effect on the lives of others, but do we stop to look at the things that we ourselves put into motion, even without intent? I know I sure as hell didn't. Because of that, I've spent the last couple of months second-guessing every communication I've ever had with people, every kind or harsh word, every shirked responsibility and every interaction with both friends and strangers. I've come to a realization from all of this. In short, it is simply this - we have absolutely no way of knowing whether or not some small, offhand thing we do or say today will, once cast out to find its way in the Universe, grow and multiply into something much, much bigger than its beginning form. That being the case, does it not behoove us to try and go more good and less harm in the first place?

If you understand the science of physics at all, then you understand that a stone thrown into water or a sound occurring in air results in the propagation of waves of force outward from the source. Given the right circumstances, small waves can be reinforced, amplified as they travel (think of tsunamis, which don't have to start out large to end up gigantic when they finally hit land). I suggest that this happens to us as well. We can't know exactly how our words and actions will end up when extrapolated through years and years of varying external influence, but perhaps we can assume one small, unscientific thing...that positive actions will tend to reinforce positively, resulting in larger beneficial outcomes down the road. A small good can perhaps become a great good simply because we gave it a good sendoff once upon a time.

So...next time you find yourself with an opportunity to speak or act, think for a moment about what comes Later as well as what you are about to do or say Now. You are a part of the Universe, as integral a part of it as any star or planet. The unseen energy world which lies beneath within the manifest and observable world is as reactive to your thoughts and actions as it is to the cataclysmic collapse of a dying star into a black hole or a radio wave beamed across the void. The difference is...a star can't help but collapse if it is above a certain size. A radio wave can't help but travel through the void once beamed there. But you and you alone have the power to control what you send forth into the Universe. Only you can put the original positive or negative spin on your words and deeds. Please make sure that, when you send that energy out there, that it is something that you'll be proud to see again 30 years in the future.