There’s a foolishness that comes with great power. It gets played out every day over the News media. It’s when notable person x or y says words to the effect; nothing will happen unless I do it. This common notion gets projected to us through mass reporting and commentary.
Every second is a pivotal moment. A last chance to move, or a last chance to act. As if time stops when we know it branches into countless possibilities. Fine, pivotal life or death moments do exist. It’s only that they are less numerous than we might be led to think. Drama takes its place in the theatre of the everyday[1].
There’s an ancient lesson to learn. It goes like this, in a simple demonstration. Place any finger into a glass of clear water. Now, remove the finger and observer the hole.
It’s a lesson Archimedes would appreciate. Although he’s famous for displacement being an indicator of what’s doing the displacement. Between the two it’s the water that’s the constant. The ebbing and flowing of time. At least as we humans perceive it.
It’s not that an individual can’t make a difference. Far from it. Individual action can make a dramatic difference. Doing the right thing at the right time, if the opportunity arises, can be the difference between catastrophe and nothing much in particular, as an outcome. In the world of major accidents, designers and operators desperately try to avoid the possibility that a single act or failure that leads to catastrophe, but it does, on rare occasions happen.
The point in discussion is the matter of what is indispensable. How often do we get to choose what is indispensable? After an event, it’s easier to answer the question. Looking back, it can be said that the factor that made the most difference was this one or that one. Before an event, we are in the land of probabilities and shiny crystal balls. Mathematics and mysticism.
The Cuban Missile Crisis[2] offers a lesson. It was only in retrospect that people learned of the action of a Soviet Naval officer who prevented a submarine from launching a nuclear torpedo.
History tells how the pivotal moment arrived. That said, there was no way the man concerned knew before time that his role would be indispensable. History would be written dramatically differently if a nuclear engagement had happened.
In the end it comes down to doing the right thing at the right time when the opportunity arose. Sometime swimming against the tide of events. Not magic exuded by a powerful individual strolling the stage.
POST: A better one. All The World’s A Stage By William Shakespeare · Jim Broadbent https://youtu.be/gUJBEy-tbo0?si=NMkIRpIr8H0wdTgv
[1] https://youtu.be/caaPlIX6AkM
[2] https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/cuban-missile-crisis
John Vincent 