Dear Reader,
We all want to make a difference. It’s perhaps the most universal human drive—this need to matter, to leave something meaningful behind, to know that our brief time here counted for something. But as I’ve watched colleagues, friends, and family members grapple with this fundamental question, I’ve come to understand that the premise itself reveals a profound truth: we all do make a difference. The only question is what kind.
Some dedicate their lives to healing—doctors working through pandemics, teachers nurturing young minds, volunteers serving in soup kitchens. Others choose paths that diminish rather than elevate: leaders who exploit trust, corporations that prioritize profit over people’s wellbeing, individuals who spread division rather than understanding. The difference we make isn’t neutral; it tilts the world toward light or darkness.
Death, whether it arrives through illness, accident, or simply the passage of time, serves as life’s great editor. It forces us to distinguish between what matters and what merely occupies our time. It asks us: What are you doing with the gift of consciousness you’ve been given?
So how do we ensure our difference is meaningful? The answer lies in recognizing and sharing our unique gifts—those particular combinations of talents, perspectives, and opportunities that only we possess.
Meaningful impact doesn’t require grand gestures or public recognition. It requires attention—to the needs around us and to the particular ways we’re equipped to meet them.
Of course, recognizing this is easier than living it. Every day presents challenges that can overwhelm our best intentions. Work pressures, family obligations, financial stress, health concerns—these realities can make us feel more like survivors than world-changers. Some mornings, just getting through feels like victory enough.
But what if we reframed these everyday struggles? What if we saw them not as obstacles to meaning-making but as the very contexts where meaning gets made? The parent who shows up tired but loving to their child’s school play. The employee who treats difficult customers with patience and respect. The neighbor who shovels an elderly person’s walkway without being asked. These small acts of care accumulate into something larger than themselves.
The challenge isn’t to transform our entire lives overnight but to infuse our ordinary moments with intentional goodness. It’s about choosing, again and again, to be agents of connection rather than division, healing rather than harm, hope rather than despair. 1
This brings us to perhaps the most profound question: What happens after we’ve shared our gifts? What lies beyond our time here?
While I respect that people hold varying beliefs about afterlife and eternity, I find deep meaning in the possibility that love—genuine, selfless love—connects us to something larger than our individual existence. Whether you conceive of this as God, as the interconnectedness of all life, or as the enduring impact of our choices on future generations, there’s something profoundly hopeful in the idea that our capacity for love transcends our biological limitations.
This isn’t wishful thinking but practical wisdom. When we live as though love is eternal—when we act as though kindness, justice, and compassion have lasting significance—we create the kind of world where such ideals can flourish. We become co-creators of the “utopian world," not through naive optimism but through deliberate, sustained commitment to our highest values.
Every morning, we face the same fundamental choice: Will we use our gifts to add light to the world or to dim it? Will we contribute to the sum total of human flourishing or detract from it?
The beautiful and terrifying truth is that this choice is always ours to make. No one else can live our particular life or offer our specific gifts. No one else occupies our exact position in the web of relationships and opportunities that surrounds us.
This is both responsibility and privilege. In a world that often feels chaotic and beyond our control, we retain the power to determine what kind of difference we make. We can choose to see each day not as a challenge to endure but as an opportunity to contribute something meaningful to the great human project of building a more loving world.
The question isn’t whether we’ll make a difference—we will, inevitably. The question is what kind of difference it will be, and whether we’ll recognize it as the profound privilege it truly is.
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