Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich, and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life. Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye. I grew up in a small town, where everybody knew everybody. The kids in your first grade class end up being the same 30 classmates in your second grade, third grade, fourth, and so on, all the way to high school graduation, unless you or they move out of town.
Problem is, if you make an enemy in first grade, you pretty much make an enemy for life, and that includes their entire posse, who can make your life miserable. It's unfortunate how one individual can cast a dark veil over a big chunk of your childhood memories. There's an old saying that if you think you're too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito in the room. There are also seven and a half billion people
in the world, and yet we often let one person ruin our day. History has proven that one person CAN make an everlasting impression for billions of others, the Buddha, Jesus, but it doesn't have to be so grand. One person can also deeply affect a single life when they give you a second chance, for example, or when they are there for you in your time of need. But how can we seemingly small mosquitoes possibly affect social change?
I found out in the most roundabout way in my 20s, when I had multiple jobs, including a 9-to-5 Monday-through-Friday corporate gig, another job in the evenings, and a third job on the weekends. One day, after a year of working at the law firm, the partners decided all paralegals and secretaries needed to rotate working on weekends. One of the reasons I originally took the job was because it offered weekends off. So when we were each suddenly asked to pick a weekend
that works best for us to cover at the firm, I refused to play along. Call it stubbornness, arrogance, or selfishness, I don't know what drove me to dig my heels in so deeply and outright refuse to work there on the weekends, but something positive and unexpected came from my hard-headedness: the partners realized that if they can't get all employees to sign up for weekends, then they can't ask any of us
to do it because it wouldn't be fair for some to and others not. As a result, the weekend project was dropped and nobody ever had to do it. I didn't mean to start a revolution, I just stood up for what I believed in, but in a way, that IS a revolution. We simultaneously realize what a big difference a single individual can make, yet we rarely credit ourselves for being able to make the same impact in someone's life, or the world at large. Why is that?
It has been many years since I have celebrated my birthday, which I used to make a big deal about when I was younger. My birthday was the one time of year when the friends I typically saw one-on-one would come together with everyone else they have only heard about throughout the year, but never got to see or meet.
One year, at some point in the late 90s, I had a room reserved for all my friends in the back of a restaurant and for one reason or another, be it a traffic accident, falling ill, or unexpected circumstances, nobody came. Just when I was about to leave with my own birthday cake in a box, a single friend arrived and I haven't taken the Power of One for granted ever since. That one friend
made all the difference. You may recall a few years ago when I first tried to raise enough money for a special prison edition of my book in paperback. I posted the invoice from my publisher online, and everyone, including myself, felt the amount was out of reach. Rather than overwhelm people with the total sum, I changed tactic and simply asked for $1 from anyone who had just $1 to spare, and believe it or not, we raised more than $20,000 in less than 24 hours.
I personally think empowering 20,000 people to make a difference was better than getting 20 people to donate $1,000 each. If the law firm or birthday party taught me the Power of One, then the fundraiser taught me the Power of One More. Never underestimate the difference you can make. I mean, this very podcast is only possible thanks to listeners like you.
You may think that I'm the one doing it, but it's listeners like you who donate as little as one dollar a month through patreon.com/buddhistbootcamp who make it possible. I'm not the one making a difference; you, my friend, are one more, and one more. I think it's safe to say we are nothing short of a revolution. You matter. Your voice matters. Every decision you make has a ripple effect that can turn into a tsunami.
So, make sure your every action supports what you're FOR, not what you're against. Just like every bite of food we take either fights disease or feeds it, we, as individuals, may seem insignificant alone, but we're still either part of the pollution or part of the solution. You choose. Timber Hawkeye is the bestselling author of Faithfully Religionless and Buddhist Boot Camp.
For additional information, please visit BuddhistBootCamp.com, where you can order autographed books to support the Prison Library Project, watch Timber's inspiring TED Talk, and join our monthly mailing list. We hope you have enjoyed this episode and invite you to subscribe for more thought-provoking discussions. Thank you for being a Soldier of Peace in the Army of Love. 🙏