I was visiting a large hospital yesterday. There were people milling around in the campus. There was litter in the compound, in spite of regular upkeep of the compound by the cleaning staff of the hospital. I was walking from the residential area to the out-patient area to catch a public transport to go into the town. I noticed a young man walking in front of me, picking up paper cups, wrappers, etc from the ground. I saw him doing it all along his walk to the exit gate.
I caught up and enquired from him, whether he was a hospital employee from the maintenance department. He was a visitor to the hospital, who came to meet a friend. He is an environmentally conscious well wisher, who was influenced by he saw a child do.
He narrated his personal experience to me. While traveling in a train to visit the hospital, he watched a child solving a wooden puzzle, by matching each piece with the others. This boy picked up each piece of puzzle one by one. This prompted him to appreciate the significance of each piece and its precise role in solving the puzzle finally.
The trash spread out in the campus were many single pieces of waste. He thought he would pick up some. Each piece contributed to the total. To approach the total, the only way was to begin with one at a time.
No task is too big, if we can see it as a sum total of several small steps. The largeness of the task is no reason to retreat in helplessness.
On my way back to the residential area, I saw another man pick up pieces of paper from the ground. He told me, that he watched someone do this in the morning.
An example is usually a good motivation for initiating a change.
` M.C.Mathew
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