Every morning, I remind myself to stop believing that I can change the world. This might sound harsh and demotivating but actually works like magic the other way round. It helped me stop expecting and be more realistic and pragmatic in life, and shifted my perception about change.
I have always believed that people can change the world when united and I still do if we had the perfect conditions which we currently don’t. I have always had a certain vision of the world that was based on my pure imagination and the motivational wisdom of the modern world (“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do“). I had also pictured how my country should be like and even started drafting a small plan on how to counter the domino effect of the failure, starting from building some effective and easy low-cost solutions based on the existing situation (such as organizing the existing public transportation) to a full adjusted operational system that will require a long term step by step implementation.
I realized then that I was too ambitious and too imaginative. I realized it when I was working to supposedly develop certain aspects of the country from a very simple and technical engineering perspective. After few years of hard work and implementing many projects, I felt like a hamster running on a wheel. I realized that we are stuck in the same place despite the hard efforts that are being made by many persons, organizations and groups. Yes a change is being created. But this change is very small and very limited compared to the investment that is being made and mostly compared to the expectations that we might have.
So looking at it from a larger perspective, change and evolution never happened because of a single sudden event (except for the big bang which is still questionable). It was never a single event that shaped the world. It has always been a continuous research, efforts, wars, conflicts, peace, paradoxes, emergencies, disasters, revolutions etc. Each event created a small scale change that impacts and creates another one.
Accordingly, I learned that I should stop believing that a drastic change is going to happen overnight. I have also learned to stop trying to revive the dead but rather to accept and move forward when something is unchangeable (refer to the dead horse theory – “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount”) .
However, this does not mean to give up on trying to create a change because there will be definitely small changes that are part of the large evolution of the world. So I started to rely on the small impact that one could do in life believing that this small impact is part of a larger one on the scale of the history of the world; something similar to a butterfly effect on the world’s timeline.
So yes, stop believing that you can change the world today. But rather keep moving forward in creating small scale changes because you are part of a continuous evolution that is shaping the world and that is creating a large scale change on the long run.
Dina Hajjar
Dina Hajjar 