There is an overwhelmingly prominent attitude that accompanies many people in metropolitan DC. You need look no further than the local Starbucks to find this attitude. You approach the coffee shop’s doors at the same time someone is exiting through your entrance. You open the door, and the exiting body brushes past you, sipping a $5 latte while chatting busily away on a teeny tiny cell phone. No thanks or acknowledgement of the people around him. As far as he is concerned the world consists of him, his cell phone, and his latte. We are all busy, and have, at some point in time, copped a superiority attitude towards our fellow doormen. Tonight, I was stuck in traffic and running late for practice and cut off someone trying to merge. I wasn’t trying to be rude; I was just so focused on me that I was sure that my needs were met. There is always an opportunity to put yourself before others. The trick is remembering its inverse.
We can do no great things, only small things with great love.
That is one of my favorite quotes from Mother Teresa. As I have gotten older, I’ve leaned upon those words like a marine would, Semper Fi. Some people, like Mother Teresa, are called to greater things than others. Yet, whether you are the Pope, or the doorman at Starbucks, you can do the small things. That is comforting to me, knowing that the small things count for something. If I can make those baby steps, maybe over a stretch of a lifetime, they will add up to one giant bound.
So with Mother Teresa’s advice I can step back into the busy late afternoon rush hour in McLean. I can let people merge in front of me, cut me off, and I am practically an ornithologist with all the birds that have been flipped in my direction. I might not be curing cancer or solving world hunger when I grab the doors and smile, keep my fingers to myself in traffic, or ask the cashier how her day has been. But at least I’m putting my drop into the ocean. Mother Teresa would observe that,
We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.
