Mixed Moss

“When people do the right thing, it’s called responsibility. When a company does the right thing, it’s called [insert the name of an insurance company I can’t remember].”

My friend Steve** posted today about how, today, he is going to try an experiement: he’s going to act on his better impulses. He’s going to stand up for justice and right wrongs and tell people who are acting nasty where they get off and tell the people those others are being nasty to how precious God says they are. And he asks the question, how would this change life for us, if we all went out of our way to do the nice, decent thing?

I like the idea of how one little thing can change your whole life. Like the commercial I quoted the tagline from above. If you haven’t seen it, it’s for an insurance company. This guy does something nice: he picks up a teddy bear or something that a child in a stroller has dropped and gives it back to the mother. And someone else sees him doing it, and you can see in their face that they’re thinking, “Hey, that was really nice. It was responsible. It was the decent thing to do. How come he went out of his way to do that?”

So then later in the day they do something to help someone else, and somebody observes them. And that person goes on and does something to help someone else. And it continues throughout the commercial, through several different people, until it all comes back to square one, with that same guy helping that same woman and child. Like one of those staircases in an Escher drawing.
It’s like the movie Pay it Forward, only better because there isn’t nearly enough of a plot for a whole movie; it’s much more suited to a thirty-second ad spot.

How do our little actions change things? Do they alter our lives forever? Do they change our fate? Or does time have an elastic quality, and tend to come back to the same place regardless of our actions? Is the fabric of the universe Lycra?

There’s a movie kind of like that called Sliding Doors. It’s a chick flick really, and features Gwyneth Paltrow (grumble grumble “wretched stick-insect” grumble grumble “evil Hollywood casting and producers giving young girls anorexia” grumble “real people don’t look like that!”) but it presents some good questions so we can forgive it that.

The movie shows a woman’s life, what happens to her if she catches a subway train in the nick of time and gets home early to find her boyfriend cheating on her, and what happens if she misses it and doesn’t discover that he’s cheating on her until much later. It tells the two stories in parallel. Without spoiling anything, in the end, it kind of leaves you guessing as to which would’ve been better. Or whether the fabric of the universe is really that alter-able after all, or if what is meant to happen will happen and it’s really only a matter of how you get there. Really interesting.

What if? What if doing the right thing today could change everything for yourself or someone else?

**Note for Firefox users: Steve’s blog features a format which does not display well on Mozilla Firefox. If you follow the link, you can still read what he has posted by right-clicking and choosing “select all.” This will highlight the white-on-white text against a blue background so that you can actually read it.**

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 8:32 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.