What about Contribution?
Last night while walking our dog, my husband and I had a discussion about what it means to make a contribution to the world.
The automatic response from some people might be, “Solve world hunger. Make a medical breakthrough. Work with the poor. Start a charitable foundation.”
I understand why those would be the first responses. Those are very public ways of contributing to the world. Those ways would affect many. Those ways would be seen and acknowledged by many.
And yet…
To contribute means to give—an idea, help, money. The challenge for most of us who contribute is that our contributions seem too small, to affect too few.
For instance, perhaps you have parented a son who will, in turn, become a wonderful father. But if you are a parent who raises your children with love, respect and commitment, it could be years…and years before you have any clue as to what effect that loving parenting will have on the world.
Or, if you are an employee—whether at MacDonald’s or MacDonald Douglas—and you work with commitment and responsibility and to the best of your abilities, can you imagine how that might improve morale and quality of work within the workplace? But we don’t always get to see how good service and a quality product improves the lives of our customers.
Or, if you are a writer or painter or musician—you get the idea—who creates with commitment regardless of whether you are writing the music for your band or a symphony for the London Philharmonic, how do you measure your contribution? By the size of the audience? By the number of recordings sold? By the money you make?
The idea of contribution, I think, becomes of greater concern the older we get, probably because we want to feel that we have meaning and purpose in our continued existence. And yet, isn’t living well and role modeling how to age with wisdom and charity enough of a contribution? Especially since so many of us struggle to do just that. But it is hard to see if the role modeling we do has any long-term or widespread effect. And yet other cultures value their elders because they hold the wisdom of lives well-lived.
If we are living our lives day to day while giving our help, our ideas, even our money with integrity, with commitment and consistency, with love and compassion, with imagination and joy, isn’t that a contribution to the world? Isn’t that enough?
May 28th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
It’s uncanny that you would post this now — I have been mulling this exact question recently. Must be that time of life we occupy. You voiced my own thoughts perfectly. I think living in a way we think will make a contribution is based on blind faith, like planting daffodil bulbs in our back yard just before we move away. We may never see them bloom, but we know they are there, planted deep with intention.
May 29th, 2009 at 11:33 am
I think it is the time of life, Marsha. I’ve heard about this issue from people in their 70s and 80s recently, but I think, as we move from parenting to other possibilities, it is something we think about in our 50s as well.
I love your metaphor of the daffodils as well–leaving a gift for others.