… a piece on my other blog about ripples…
http://theprogenitor.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/recently-i%e2%80%99ve-been-thinking-about%e2%80%a6/
… It’s about my pending dadhood… and everything else… pretty all-encompassing! It was partially inspired by a TV drama I’ve just watched about the life of Jane Austen, but also relates to stuff I’ve been thinking about the last couple of weeks or so… namely that if one takes into account the entirety of the future, even the smallest things (words/acts) can reverberate through all of time and space.
Regarding the life of Jane Austen, it would seem that she led what she would consider to be an unremarkable existence, and yet… how her words have influenced future generations!
I am also nearly half way through Stephen Baxter’s Time’s Tapestry series of novels – a substantial aspect of which is about the passing down of prophecies from generation to generation – sometimes in a written form, sometimes through word of mouth… These prophecies could have an immense, far-reaching impact upon the entire history of mankind… and yet how precariously the words of such are preserved, on sheets of vellum and in the minds of individuals who are bashed and buffeted by the impartial winds of time! There is a metaphor for all existence here, methinks…
So regarding ripples… we should never presume our lives are as small as they might seem, as inconsequential as we might think they are… we should never presume there is “no point” in offering a few words of advice… in sharing our thoughts in a diary, on a blog or in a letter, email or text… or through a casual conversation with a stranger on a bus or a train or in the queue at Tesco’s… or offering a sympathetic nod or a smile or laughing at someone’s joke (whether funny or not!)… because the tiniest, initially imperceptible ripples we send out may reverberate, grow, become waves, and bounce around all the shores of the Ocean of Existence…
Our ripples may change the world! 
