Written by Guy Finley

In a thousand different ways, every day we are meant to begin to see that it’s so easy to run on automatic. Everything just goes on, doesn’t it?  Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s bad. But it just goes on. We are meant to understand that as long as we live from a life that just goes on, no difference is taking place in our life or in the world we’re in. We’re just part of a great machine, churning itself over and over again. Repetition, reincarnation, recurrence is all that’s happening. 

It’s the clarity of this understanding that produces the need and the willingness an individual must have to make a difference. And it can be in the smallest way – as when you’re polite to somebody at the cost of yourself.   You catch and see the impolite person in yourself and don’t give it a voice. To make a difference means that you are being different in the moment so that nobody knows what you’re doing and what you had to give up. That’s the beauty of it. Those you have interacted with won’t even know anything happened. They won’t know that you suffered yourself and allowed something new to happen.

When we actually make a difference, we make a difference for the whole of the world. And we never do it for self-serving purposes. We don’t make a difference when we think about our unhappiness, or when we think about the emptiness in our life, and how to fill it.

When we think about our anger, frustration, grievances or regrets, we’re never making a difference in that moment. We’re just measuring how un-different things are from what we want them to be, and how dedicated we are going to be by changing things in the future. 

The nature in the midst of that doesn’t change until something changes in our consciousness. We are given the gift to be aware of what the world within ourselves is doing to us, and in the awareness of that to make a difference. But we can only make a difference in our life in the present moment in which it unfolds.

If we’re going to make a real difference in this life, in our life, we have to make it right now, because if we don’t make it now, when are we going to make it? Did we make it today? Is there a tomorrow in which we’re actually going to make a difference? 

If you work to make a difference in your own life moment-to-moment, I promise you the world around you will become different -- maybe not noticeably in terms of family or friends, but I guarantee you this, you can’t consistently change the equation of the way this consciousness meets the moment without changing all the moments that come thereafter… and even before.

Guy Finley is an internationally renowned spiritual teacher and bestselling author.  He is the founder and director of Life of Learning Foundation, a nonprofit center for spiritual self-study located in Merlin, Oregon. Guy offers online classes twice each week, which are free to all and have been attended by thousands of students throughout the world. You can learn more and register at  www.guyfinley.org/letgo.