Your little contribution can make a huge difference

“Life is not accumulation, it is about contribution”. - Stephen Covey

It is used to be thought that the events that changed the world were things like big bombs, maniac politicians, huge earthquakes, or vast population movements, but it has now been realized that the things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe. Qasim Ali Shah always emphasized the point that small changes bring huge uprisings. A small contribution in a society is much worthy because individually we are drops and together we are an ocean.

butterfly effect

“Nobody can predict the future, you just have to give your all to contribution”- Qasim Ali Shah

As I learned about people, I got more interested in the gaps between them as a civilization relative to the challenges that are in front of them. And one of the gaps I have seen is around the simple concept that everyone is connected and playing his own part. We probably heard this many times, in fact, it is an element of every spiritual tradition of humankind. Whenever I hear people mentioning this phrase “we are all connected”, they do so in a way that something they wish that they can believe it’s true. They think it is an abstract or esoteric, a thing that they really wish that universe was like that. Through a story of breath and heart, I am going to describe that everything is connected and your small contribution can cause a dramatic change in society as well as the future, in a very concrete and understandable way.
The deep calm breath we are taking was not possible 3 billion years ago. During that time period we were having the approximately same amount of nitrogen in the atmosphere but no oxygen at all. Instead, we were having huge amounts of carbon dioxide. The only organism that could exist at that time were single cell organisms. Luckily for us, one of the organisms that were alive at that time was cyanobacteria, having a special trick called photosynthesis (taking energy from sun and transforming carbon dioxide to oxygen and water). Over the course of 2.5 billion years little by little these bacteria spread over the planet and converted all the carbon dioxide in to oxygen that we now have. It was a very slow process, first, they have to saturate the seas, the lands with oxygen and just 900 million years ago oxygen stated to build up in the atmosphere.  About 600 million years ago a dramatic change occurs, the ozone layer was formed from the oxygen that was released from cyanobacteria into the atmosphere. We take the ozone layer as a small deal but actually before the formation of ozone earth was not able to sustain complex multicellular organisms like human beings. Nothing we are familiar with today could exist without the contribution of that cyanobacteria. And they actually never left us, this character of cyanobacteria was eventually captured by the plants and are called chloroplast. Tons of chloroplast is trapped in leaves contributing photosynthesis and generating energy for plants continuing to be another half of our lungs on earth. In this way our breath are deeply united, our out-breath is mirrored by their in-breath of plants and our in-breath are mirrored by their out-breath

contribution of cyanobacteria

Imagine for a moment that you are such cyanobacteria 2.5 billion years ago, you might be born, lived a couple of weeks and died. You have gone to feel like nothing really changed, you are having no purpose in this life, the world I came to is exactly the world I left. But the thing you would not understand is that every breath you took contributed to the possibilities of countless lives after you, lives you will never see, lives we are all part of today. It is worth thinking that may be meanings of our lives are not even under the scope of our understandings because it was true for every one of those organisms and it may also be true for us

Now we are moving to the story of heart, at this moment your hearts are beating, and the reason is to move a molecule through blood called hemoglobin. The heart of this complex molecule is a single atom of iron which binds the oxygen and allows it to flow through our circulatory system. One thing you may not know is that the universe started with only helium, hydrogen and no iron at all. But due to the processes of stars exploding and forming, again and again, iron was able to form. But the story does not end here, if we scrutinize way back on the level of hundred thousands of galaxies, the most robust way of star formation is galactic collisions which took half a billion of years. Galaxies smashing into each other under the gravitational influence and interstellar gasses mixing together setting on fire with new star formation across the entire galaxy. This gravitational dance of hundred thousand galaxies squirreling together derived the creation of iron that courses through each and every vein with every heartbeat.

iron produced by star collisions

“The compound effect is like the growth of tree”- Qasim Ali Shah

As a tree takes time consistent nourishment to grow, we also need time ad consistent learning to develop our personality. Now, this all leads to the question that in what manner we are going to do that? We are blessed with a very beautiful gift of faith and consciousness which makes us different from all other animals. We can deeply understand the connectivity. It is a truth to be told that every champion, every victorious person, every king and every winner has felt in the urge to quit. However hard it is, it may take you twice as long, you might not move as quickly but don’t you quit, you do make a difference. There is something that you would lose if you were not there, you do make the difference. It does not matter what you have done in one day, what you have done consistently matters. Your faith, values, consistent efforts, decision, and patience will ultimately give you a huge result.

“People find meaning and redemption in the most unusual human connections.”

I think a lot of us understand that we exist in this marvelous universe but we feel our existence as a tiny unimportant thing which is 1 out of the society of 7 billion people in this universe and how can we matter? We just think about this like a container relationship that all goodness comes from outside to the inside and there is nothing special about us. But Qasim Ali Shah elaborates the power of being by saying,” the way we are in our lives, the way we affect our family and friends begins to change the future and universe itself”. I wish us all to realize the truth of compound effect and come together with faith, knowledge and understanding that our tiny efforts are connected to bring out enormous results.