Life is hard, with many contrasting things, all fighting with each other for supremacy. Sometimes you laugh, sometimes you cry. Sometimes you are burning with passion for something, sometimes the passion leaves. But through it all, you have to ask yourself – is what I’m doing helping or hurting?
If I can’t even make one person understand me, how can I change the world? If I can hurt someone, how can it be said that I’m making the world better?
This is something that many people are grappling with today, in this postmodern, post-truth world. We all want to make the world better as we see it, we see how the world could be a better place. But how do we know that we’re making the world a better place? How do we know we’re not hurting more than we’re helping?
Jordan Peterson, a man who, despite his many flaws, is highly intelligent, speaks to exactly this question. “Clean your room”, he says. The first thing you have to do is get your own “room” in order – your living space, your room, your mind, whatever – and once you’ve “sorted yourself out”, as he says, then you’ll be able to go out and help to coax the rest of the world into the same order that you’ve gotten your own world into.
What do you want? What do you want the world to look like? Do you want it to be a reflection, a projection, of your own unresolved issues? Or do you want it to reflect actually healing, to reflect your own inner peace into the world? Is it necessary to impose yourself onto the world, or will it become a better place when you’ve learned to deal with your own issues and help the world to deal with its own issues too?
Change starts with you, but so does love, a “worldwide chain of positivity”. Laugh, and the world laughs with you, as the proverb says. But cry, and you may make the rest of the world cry too. But they may not be crying with you. If you don’t fix yourself first, they may be crying because of you.