You May Never Know
SHORT STORIES
You May Never Know
We publish a lot of words here.
Posts. Comments. Ideas. Experiences.
Most of them remain on someone’s screen for a few seconds before the next one takes their place.
And sometimes I wonder if any of it really matters.
Then I remember something.
Some of the ideas that have changed the way I think came from people who will probably never know they did.
A paragraph in a book.
A sentence in an article.
A comment buried beneath someone else’s post.
Sometimes even a few words written almost casually.
I read them, carried them with me, and somewhere along the way they became part of the way I see things.
Not necessarily immediately.
Some ideas simply stay there, quietly, until an experience gives them meaning.
And that makes me think differently about why we write and share.
Perhaps the value of an idea cannot always be measured by how many reactions it receives or how many comments it generates.
Because then this stops being a competition for reactions, comments, or attention.
It becomes a contribution to a universal collection of human experience: the what, the how, and the why of what we have lived.
Each of us adds something.
An experience.
A mistake.
A question.
A discovery.
A different way of seeing something.
Most contributions will be small.
Many will disappear into the enormous amount of words we produce every day.
But they are there.
And there is always the possibility that someday, somewhere, someone will find a few of those words at exactly the moment they need them.
Perhaps they will make that person question something they had always assumed.
Perhaps they will help them understand something they were struggling to understand.
Or perhaps they will simply change the direction of their thinking by a few degrees.
And a few degrees, over enough distance, can lead somewhere completely different.
The person who wrote those words may never know.
Maybe that is enough.