Our Place in Human History – Sunday, October 04, 1981
“The only real differences in the world are made by one person—the right person in the right place at the right time.” So wrote Sydney Harris. “It is one person,” he continued, “who makes the difference everywhere.” And he added that these makers of history don’t have to be famous or important in the world. “John Wilkes Booth, a fanatical failure, changed history quite as much as Lincoln did.”1
We also sometimes think only the famous dates in history are important such as 1492 or 1776. But these dates are perhaps no more vital to the history of humanity than some other unnoted days that have passed. The day, for instance, when an obscure patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland began to bring order to the ideas of motion and matter swirling in his head. The day when a sympathetic woman looked on a small boy in the corner of a cabin, agreed to become his beloved stepmother.
Important days? Yes, when one knows that the patent clerk was Albert Einstein, and the small boy was Abraham Lincoln.
“History is the essence of innumerable biographies,” wrote Carlyle.2 Now we may think our life story is unimportant or uninteresting, but perhaps that is only because we’re so close to it.
John Gardner wrote, “History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.”3
But it should comfort us to know that every person’s life is part of human history. Like the widening ripples of a stone dropped into a still pool, the effects of every life spread and blend with others. It’s impossible to weigh where or when the influence of a life stops.
Because each life is so important, we owe it to ourselves and to those we care about to record our daily deeds, our dreams, our accomplishments, and our disappointments. By so doing we can see more clearly the purpose of our own lives and how we fit into the whole of human history. And by so recording our personal histories we can leave direction and encouragement to those who follow.
1 “The Importance of Just One Person”, Sydney Harris, The Deseret News, August 20, 1981, p A-S.
2 “On History” Thomas Carlyle, quoted in The International Thesaurus of Quotations, Rhonda Thomas Tripp, comp, Thomas Y. Crowell, New York, 1970, p 417
3 No Easy Victories, John W Gardner, New York, Harper and Row, 1968, p, 27
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October 04, 1981
Broadcast Number 2,720