Small is Beautiful: One of the most important insights any of us can have is that it's possible to live a truly heroic life on a small scale utterly outside the glaring, blaring global media complex, and to do lasting good for many of our fellow human beings, not in massive numbers and all at once, but over time, one by one.

There can be a special purity, a nobility, a distinct glory in the life of the small fish in the small pond who brightens up the prospects of each day and shows those in his or her proximity the wonder of greatness that can be and can thrive amid the ordinary run of things. This is where the real magic is.

One of my favorite characters in George Eliot’s deep and engaging novel Middlemarch begins the story full of promise, lives through various disappointments to her dreams, rises above the slings and arrows of her changing fortune, and finally, in the end, living in outwardly diminished circumstances, does her own form of wonderful good for her fellows in small and constant ways and clearly becomes the ultimate hero of the story. Eliot writes:

<<Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.>>

For Eliot’s magnificent novel, click HERE. Then, go do your own good in small and lasting ways on this precious day we’ve all been given.