End of an Era

You know how sometimes in life you get a little busy, then walk into your house one day and read about something that happened and think "Whoa! When did that happen!? How'd I miss that?! I'm so out of it..."

That happens in blogging sometimes, too. As busy season begins (see below), I decided to vainly try to catch up on at least some of my favorite blogs from the last couple of weeks worth of posts, only to discover that Soccer Dad has decided to call it quits - not completely, but as host of Haveil Havalim, after next week. After 150 weeks of running it. There's certainly a shmuess somewhere in there about the impact of a single person and how the ripple effects that have come from HH and have spread throughout the J-blogosphere have affected so much. Certainly this blog would be almost non-existent if not for HH, and this blog is but one of hundreds of similar ripples.

One of the many points I'm trying to touch on in my "long post" that will continue to go up this week is the idea that what we do doesn't affect anything - that we have such a minimal impact as to make our efforts completely not worthwhile. I think SoccerDad and what he's done with HH is the perfect answer to that. The skeptical response to this is often "well, what major impact has it had?" But that's just it - a series of minor impacts causes another series of minor impacts which cause another series... and that never really ends. Too often, people look at the big picture, think it is an impossible task, and simply decide that it cannot be done. Let's just live our lives and forget about "all that". But there's so much more than that. Sure, perhaps the overall big picture won't change all that much, but at least we can change some of the scenery! We can change the details, the background, the little foundations that are there. Those do impact the overall picture, even if it's not so easy to see.

Yiasher Kochacha, David.