Invisible people.

Do you think it's possible to leave a positive mark behind in this world? I stress the word positive because I think it's much, much easier to leave and/or make a negative one. It's easy to hurt others. To cause them heartache and pain. Is it just as easy to leave behind something positive in this world? Perhaps but it would seem that the effects of kindness aren't nearly as visible as negativity. Ripples in a pond, right? One act of kindness, or of cruelty, will be passed on and on and on unseen and unknown by the one who started the wave. When I leave this world behind me I'd like to leave it at least a little better than it would have been if I'd never been here. Sometimes it feels like this wish is too big. Too much for me to accomplish while I'm here. I feel invisible. As if I'm passing through this life unnoticed and unnecessary. As an individual I know that I don't matter but as one small part of a greater whole I cannot help but feel that I have a responsibility to give something to a world that finds me unnecessary and unimportant. Perhaps it is in the giving rather than the taking where we can find our purpose for being here? The ability to become necessary and needed even if doing so makes us invisible and forgotten. Assuming we were ever known.

As I grow older I find myself losing my dreams. Yet perhaps it is not a loss of a dream I see but the changing of one dream into another? The sleeper waking up? When I die the world will have lost nothing of any importance. Those few who even notice my absence will shrug off my passing and forget who I was like a dream upon waking. I'll fade away and the ripples I've left behind will eventually fade away as well until there is nothing to mark that I'd ever existed. Is it this way for all of us? Even the most powerful, the most famous and the most well-known? We all know who Abraham Lincoln was. Or do we? We know what history records. We know what he looked like at the moment a photograph was taken and we know what speeches were made. At least those recorded. But even Abraham Lincoln remains unknown to us. What made him real. What made him laugh and cry and smile. What his favorite memory, his secret joys were, all the things that made Abraham Lincoln a real, living person are forgotten. If they were ever really known. If Lincoln could disappear so thoroughly, what hope is there for any of us to be remembered? In the end, the very end of things, not even memories will be left behind. We will vanish completely as if we never were. Or will we? Does our being here, living our lives, have an invisible purpose that we will never see or know?

You see me and you don't. You hear me and you don't. You know me and you don't. Our hopes, dreams, fears and pain. We're all invisible to each other and yet, I suspect ... I hope and pray ... that we are also necessary to each other in a way incomprehensible while we walk through this piece of eternity granted us.

Maybe the whole problem is that when it comes to security and purpose, we're all looking in the wrong places?

Yet another weekend is upon us. How quickly this life seems to be passing.