One of my favorite books ever is Middlemarch …

One of my favorite books ever is Middlemarch by George Eliot. She (George was her pen-name) manages to so perfectly capture motivations, behavior, the way people are, and uses such gorgeous language while doing it.

As this momentous year comes to a close, it is so apparent that change happens step-by-step, and that profound changes happen that way as well. Also, that every single one of us affects so many people—our children, our partners, our friends, the grocery store cashier, a stranger on the street with whom we exchange glances—and that effect is immeasurable. Gladness is contagious. Benevolence spreads one by one. Something that is hard to remember in this need-to-be-famous-to-have-meaning culture. In my upcoming book, This Messy Magnificent Life (#TMML), I write about how change really happens and the importance of working with our minds and their pull to fear and negativity.

Here are a few lines about Dorothea Brooks, one of the main characters in Middlemarch: “Her full nature…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 unvisted tombs.”

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