August 24, 2016

Thinking this morning about effort and change—what I fight for and why, especially when it seems fairly hopeless—and this scene from David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas comes crawling into my mind: When the book’s most idealistic character makes a choice that flies in the face of convention—knowing that the road he’ll walk will be long and painful, and what he does manage to change will be, in the grand scheme of things, largely unnoticeable—he’s told that his life will amount to “no more than one drop in a limitless ocean.” And his response? “Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”