Doing Good

Great things, small things

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

In Big Steve Long, a western novella I wrote several years ago, a remorseful outlaw wants to compensate for the crimes he committed in his youth. He decides he can do so by taming Laramie, Wyoming, a wild town in the 1860s. Although most of us haven’t robbed banks or killed lawmen, I imagine that many of us have done things we’d like to compensate for. We regret having made the world a worse place — perhaps slightly and perhaps unintentionally, but in a way that keeps us up at night — and we want to make it better. I also imagine that some of us want to make it better, not because we regret what we’ve done, but just because we want to make it better.

How does one make the world a better place?

I sometimes fantasize about doing great things: developing a cure for cancer, feeding the starving of the world, devising a peace plan for all the war-torn nations. But here’s a suggestion I’ll make to myself: consider doing small things:

Pick up trash on the sidewalk.

Listen to an acquaintance talk about something I’m not interested in hearing.

Park across the street from the post office so that someone else can take the convenient space in front of it.

And so on.

Once more, how does one make the world a better place?

Doing good doesn’t always mean doing something that would qualify me for the Nobel Peace Prize. Sometimes, it means doing something small, something that nevertheless should be done.

John Porter manages his family’s cattle ranch in California, where he also writes essays, stories, and screenplays — and occasionally does some small, good things.