Mahatma Gandhi believed every single act was important. He suggested once to “think of the poorest person you have ever seen and ask if your next act will be of any use to him.â€
In a world where we’re generally evaluating each act on its ability to help us gain more power, wealth, or comfort, this is an interesting twist of perspective.
Or am I wrong about that? Maybe we don’t evaluate our every act to determine how it might help us gain more power, wealth, or comfort. Maybe the majority of our actions “just sorta’ happen†– without much thought.
Of course, a psychologist would probably argue with me that our unconscious mind is, in fact, doing some level of evaluation before we act – that beneath the most (apparently) mindless act is some level of measurement and decision. The scales used in that measurement and decision-making are often hard to fathom, having been built up over our lifetime to serve some hidden set of scale-masters.
Makes sense. After all, we’d be crippled by analysis if every single little thing we did needed to be analyzed before we could act.
But what if…
we were just a little more thoughtful in our process? What if more of our actions did involve a conscious effort to predict who will benefit from that action? And just as important, who will be hurt by our action.
