Making a difference

"Live life fully while you're here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You're going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process. Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it. Don't try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human.” Anthony Robbins

Yesterday, my eldest daughter, Alexis, and I had a talk about 'making a difference'. It is a term I hear often from volunteers who come into the homeless shelter where I work.

"I just want to make a difference," they inevitably say when asked, "What brought you here?"

It is perhaps, one of the greatest struggles of our clients. They don't believe they make a difference to anyone let alone have the capacity to make a difference in their own lives.

For most of our clients, the mistakes they've made in their lives, the mishaps that have tripped them up have brought them so far down they've lost the belief they have the power to change their direction, or that getting up will make any difference to their lives.

Like me, my daughters share in an innate desire to change the world. I don't think I consciously passed along my desire to create a world of change, but after listening to my daughter, I realized, I have.

Most of my life I have wanted to 'make a difference'. Even as a little girl I wanted to change the world. In discussions around the dining room table about world events, I inevitably took the side of the underdog -- who would protect them amongst the vociferous voices calling them down, calling them out to stand up and get a life? I believed it was up to me, my job, my purpose.

It is a belief I have quietly carried most of my life. Quietly carried because it was one I began to fear in its expression. What did it mean to 'want to make a difference'? What was the difference I was making?

Marian Wright Edelman said, "We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee."

Years ago, I wrote and produced a play with a group of street teens. Ten years later, I ran into one of those young actors at a business meeting. He gave me a big hug and proceeded to thank me for making such a difference in his life. He is now married, working, has a home of his own, two kids and a dog. "Because of you my life is way different than it would have been had I continued in the direction I was going," he said.

At the time I wrote the play and struggled to get it produced, I didn't know what difference I was making. I just knew I wanted to give these kids a chance to tell their story, to speak up for themselves and find their voice.

On May 21, 2003 when I was released from the abusive relationship that was killing me, (visit my website to find out more) I didn't know what to do to make a difference in my life. I just knew I had to do something different if I was to heal. I didn't feel like I made a difference, but, believed different was possible if I kept taking baby-steps away from the past and into the possibilities of my today.

To keep myself inspired, I reminded myself of things I'd done in the past that made a difference, in my life, or in the lives of those I loved or those I worked with. Because I had forgotten (and lost) who I was, I needed to find those touchstones that said, remember -- you did this, you were capable of that, you achieved this. If I could do it then, I could do it again -- it just took conviction, commitment and a ceaseless desire to heal. Writing that play was a significant touchstone for me. Not only did it change the lives of the kids I worked with, it changed my life, then and when I needed the memory most.

Sometimes, we don't know what the difference is we make until someone reminds us that in what we did or said, they found hope, strength, encouragement, inspiration.

To make a difference, we have to accept that what we do is enough. Being our most magnificent selves doesn't mean climbing mountains, jumping tall buildings, and putting out forest fires all in one breath. It means accepting the difference between hope and despair or love and indifference, is felt in how we live this moment. When we live it with fiery passion, never letting the flame of our belief in our magnificence be extinguished, we make a difference.

There are enough people in this world who would have us believe life is a senseless journey with little purpose other than to struggle from cradle to grave.

Life is a passionate journey of love.

Life it up. Live large. Live it for all you're worth. And, as Anthony Robbins suggests, keep taking chances, keep turning your mistakes into wonderful lessons of living life fearlessly.

The question is: Are you struggling to find your purpose? Do you use fear of making a difference as the reason for not being the difference you want to make?