The World Spins On.

It seems that there are a plethora of events that change the world forever and each one eclipses the last.

What exactly does it take to change the world? Everyone knows that certain events have have done so. 9/11 and the subsequent move of Western troops into the Middle East caused. The end of the Cold War. The arrival of the Internet.

But what about smaller events? Like Iran getting nuclear weapons. Sure, that has a huge effect on many countries and a smaller effect on the world at large, but can it really be classified as a world-changing event?

Must something be hugely extreme to be a world-changing event?

I have a friend who runs a project in India which introduces Jatropha, a crop that can be used for a very efficient and cheap biofuel, to local farmers. Is that world-changing?

I'm going to go into a bit of a metaphor for this.

Let's say a man had his arm chopped off. No matter what prosthetics he gets, he will always have lost his arm. The cells that make up his arm will never come back.

Let's look at another man who has not had his arm chopped off. Over the course of time, cells in his arm die and are replaced by new cells. By the end of the seven years, every cell that made up his arm at the beginning of the time period is dead and will never return. Has he lost his arm?

Now another metaphor.

One man writes a piece of music. A second man hears the music and feels that it would be better if the music ended with a different chord at a single spot. He changes it, and now the tone of the music is much brighter. The first man doesn't like the change and sticks with his own piece.

Is the second man's version his own music now?

I think that everything we do changes the world. Every small action is another cell dying and being replaced until we have something completely different than we started with, even if we don't always notice the difference. Not in the butterfly flaps its wings kind of way, as in every action we do can cause a bigger action. I mean that every action, in and of itself, is world changing, because all of us are part of the world, and changing one part of the world changes all of it.

I have no idea what that means, and I'm not if it really matters at all.

But hell, life is like that. Sometimes you just get plopped down in the middle of things and you have no idea whether anything you do matters or, if it does, why it matters and what it'll cause, but you end up doing it anyways just for the sake of it.

Also, I'm cranky and I have no idea why. I think it's because I stopped wearing a suit.