Piano

A long time ago, a family from our church moved out west. I don't remember where they moved or why they moved, but since they moved from new hampshire, any of the 48 states to the left are all "out west" to me.
They gave our family a spinet piano that has been in our dining room ever since.
I quit piano lessons when I was in 3rd grade, something that I regret now. But it has meant that I hardly ever touch the piano in the dining room.
Every now and then, when no one else is home, I noodle around on it. But that's the extent of my experience playing piano.

With that said, I have just experienced something that every person reading this needs to experience.

Find a piano sometime when no one is around. I suggest a big room. There are few things in the World of Man-Made-Things that I love more dearly than enormous empty rooms.
Play a single note up high.
For your sake right now, just imagine it.
Its just a note.
A single, solitary note that has almost no effect.
It has a brief life, but no matter how hard you play that high note, it quickly dies away.

But then you have to try using the sustain pedal.
When you hold down the sustain pedal, you unlock every string in the piano and allow them all to move freely. When you hold down the pedal and play the exact same note, you get something amazing and pretty unnerving.
Instead of just quickly dying out, that note causes every string to make noise. It literally effects everything around it. That same note now lasts almost forever. Even after the initial note has faded, the entire piano keeps talking and talking and talking. Its chilling to listen to.

I'm just a little bit obsessed with how I don't know the name of any of my great-great grandfathers. After 4 generations, I have no idea who those people were. But they set in motion a chain of events that caused me to be born, in the process causing God only knows how many other things to happen on this earth.

Usually in our heads, we think about our actions like a single note on a piano. We go about our lives as a string of isolated incidents. But the reality is that everything impacts everything.
Everything we do that comes in contact with the rest of Humanity reverberates like a note on a piano.
Our actions die out quickly. We live and die. But the results and consequences of even the little things last for a really, really long time.