Letters to Ukraine – 29

How can we gauge the true value of our actions? Life is one vast, interconnected equation: we cannot predict how our choices will ramify through humanity. For instance, an elderly man leaves everything to a local home for dogs. How silly, the relatives cry. Thoughtless old fool! Many years on, however, a Labrador adopted from that very home gives a lonely young woman a reason to live. But for her warm-hearted pet, she would have committed suicide. Decades later, that woman founds a great institution for world peace. How well that inheritance was spent! Hmm… not quite. Unfortunately, the institution grows corrupt, undoing all its previous good work and causing endless misery. Here’s another example. A politician campaigns tirelessly to change international law to help developing nations. But the new laws are flawed; things actually get worse. A mistake? Well, no – because the situation becomes so appalling that the world finally comes together to implement genuine justice. So, we can never know, fully, the greater purposes through which we live and function. What, then, to do? Simply this: act always from the Heart (not sentimentally, but truthfully). Do that and one way or another – and eventually – all the equations of Life will be solved.
© Mario Petrucci, 2013