Do you see yourself as ‘part’ of something? Do you play a big part, or a small part?
Maybe you think “big” is more important than “small.”
The strirrup bone inside the eardrum is the smallest bone in the human body. And the femur is the biggest bone in the human body. Which is most important? Well, I wouldn’t want to do without either of those parts, would you? How powerful those parts are!
On the other hand, many of the deadliest creatures on Earth are also some of the tiniest (like the deathstalker scorpion) It’s the diminutive size of these animals that makes them so terrifying because they’re hard to see. Their small size gives them power, too
A few weeks ago, one of my sons put a new radiator in his car–all by himself! It took him time, many hours on quite a few days to do it, mostly because he was missing a tiny little part of what it would take to complete the job–a disconnect tool. Everything was fine except he needed that tiny tool to get his big radiator running like it should.
Whether a thing is “big” or “small” is not important. What’s important is that it do the job it was created to do.
Each of us has a part to play in life. It may seem a small part to us, but small things can literally change the world for the better—if we are not so absorbed in ourselves, if we remember that everyone we meet is journeying through life with us, and if we hold out a hand to another fellow traveler every now and then.
Translating a World on the Edge 