Ever since I read this passage from Leonard Woolf’s memoir, it has haunted me.
Leonard Woolf was an English political theorist, author, publisher and civil servant, and husband of author Virginia Woolf.
In The Journey Not the Arrival Matters: Autobiography of 1939-1969, Woolf writes:
“Looking back at the age of eighty-eight over the fifty-seven years of my political work in England, knowing what I aimed at and the results, meditating on the history of Britain and the world since 1914, I see clearly that I achieved practically nothing…I must have in a long life ground through between 150,000 and 200,000 hours of perfectly useless work….
Though all that I tried to do politically was completely futile and ineffective and unimportant, for me personally it was right and important that I should do it.”
It’s right to do the right thing, even when it doesn’t seem to make any difference. And we never can really know what the effect of our actions will be – on the world, or on ourselves.
A lesson that’s very much in keeping with the very title of Woolf’s autobiography: the journey, not the arrival, matters.
Have you ever poured a lot of time and energy into a project that seemed, in the end, to be futile? Was it right that you made the effort, even if it didn’t seem to pay off?
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The post A Little Happier: It’s Right to Do the Right Thing, Even When It Doesn’t Seem to Matter. appeared first on Gretchen Rubin.
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