Chapter 58 — Tiny impacts.
Fleeting, but memorable.
I’m unsure as to how clear this is through my writing, or whether it’s even possible to tell, but I write these Chapters from scratch each day, idea and all. I’m a creator who puts pressure on himself to perform every single day. No room for errors.
It’s a terrible system, and I wouldn’t strongly recommend it. Waking up every morning without any idea of what words you’re going to present to people that day is exciting and it can be rewarding if your brain is ready to be creative. But it’s also quite tiring and stressful having to do that once every 24 hours.
I’d quite like to change my system, and take some of the pressure off myself, but that’s for another day and another Chapter.
Today, I’m opening with the above because, for once, I’m building a post out of something which has sat in my phone’s notes for a good number of weeks. It’s nothing extraordinary or mind-blowing but I had a feeling it would make for an interesting Chapter in the future if I could add more to it.
And here we are.
The note itself is an observation I made of an elderly lady (probably in her late 70s) who was sat across from me during a train ride back to Barrow in May. We were about an hour and 15 minutes in to a two hour journey, and she seemed to have a pretty good understanding of how to use her Samsung Galaxy. She’d made a call, text a fair bit, and taken some photos (in portrait mode).
Then we got to this spot on the journey to Barrow from Manchester where, just after Arnside, the train crosses a bridge over the bay and it completely opens up on either side of the carriage; a long stretch of water in front of rolling green hills. It’s a view I always look forward to every time I head back to Barrow, and I take photos of it every now and again.
This was one of those occasions, and the lady opposite me had decided to do the same. As she’d been doing earlier, she was taking all of her photos in portrait mode, tapping away and getting a fair few snaps.
Then I get my phone out, spin it landscape and press it against the glass to try and minimise reflections.
She copies me. She flips her phone landscape and moves it closer to the glass.
I’m not sure why I thought that worthy of a note on my phone as a Chapter ‘idea’, but something about the whole occurrence just made a mark on me for some reason.
This was a lady in her 70s (at a minimum), with a life full of memories and experience and successes and failures. And in that moment, in that split second where I pressed my phone against the glass and tapped out a few photos, I had an impact on her life.
Now, I’m not going to sit here and try to convince you all that I indirectly taught this lady something new. And it might have been a small impact in the moment, indirectly suggesting to her that a landscape photo would do a better job of capturing what she wanted to capture. But who knows how deep that impact has gone?
For some reason, even a month and a half on, I still occasionally think about this tiny, insignificant experience.
Why?
I read a blog post today by Tim Urban on something that he calls Clueyness, which is his name for the phenomenon of feeling overwhelmingly bad for certain people in certain situations. But these aren’t your average, big newsworthy incident situations. These are situations that have left a mark on you more than they’ve probably left a mark on the person you feel bad for. Like that grandpa who made 12 burgers for his six grandkids and only one showed up for dinner. Or the 89-year-old who dressed up all fancy for her art showing, and no one even came. These are cluey stories that hit us harder than they probably hit the person in the situation.
But reading that blog post caused me to remember the note I’d made at the end of May. The note I’d quickly typed down while noticing an impact I’d had on that specific person at that specific time. An impact that I’ve arguably been more impacted by than the person I actually impacted.
And yet, what if it did have an impact on her as much as it did me? What if her photo gallery is now filled with great-looking landscape images that she enjoys flicking through from time to time? What if, armed with the knowledge that she now can take better photos, she’s gone out of her way to get a picture that looks fantastic? One that she can show to her friends and family and be proud of.
Odds are, this was a solitary impact with no spread. But it’s interesting to think about the what ifs.
Unlike Urban, I have no new word to describe the phenomenon of feeling more impacted by your actions than the person you actually impacted. I wouldn’t go as far as incorporating the butterfly effect in to this, and I have no ‘Cluey’ of my own.
I just have the feeling that sometimes, somewhere, my impact is wider and greater than I could ever imagine.
Everything Else…
Right, the job. I still haven’t had a solid yes, but I’ve been told I’ll get an update later in the week and it is “very positive news”. So I’m… positive. More news when I get it.
If you’d like to read Tim Urban’s post, click it up over here. If you’re not that interested in it, then I’d highly recommend his TED Talk called Inside The Mind of a Master Procrastinator. To make your life easier, you can watch it below.
Thanks for reading today’s philosophical ramble!
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