A Quotation to Live By

by J. D Ball
(Virginia Beach)

Oliver Wendell Holmes is quoted has having said, “A man must share in the action and passion of his times, or risk having never lived at all.”

For about 40 years, this saying has helped provide me the motivation to be interested in what is happening outside my own narrow interests and become involved in important larger concerns.

While taking a college course in social psychology at the University of Virginia four decades ago, I recall first being shocked and then reluctantly accepting conclusions from social psychology research that most people would not become personally involved in crises, even when another person’s physical well being was threatened.

This series of separate research studies was published under the title question, “When will people help in a crisis?” It was discouraging to me to realize that the most common assumption of bystanders, particularly if people were alone when they learned that someone was in trouble, was that someone else would help and that the crisis really did not involve them.

Most subjects in this research concluded that it was not necessary to become involved, and so they did not. It was at about the same time that I was reading about this research that I ran across this inspirational saying from Oliver Wendell Holmes.

The saying then made an enormous impression on me. In the context of this research, I understood not only what Holmes meant but I understood his need to say it. There have been many instances in the last forty years when I have been faced with decisions about whether or not to act or speak up over something I cared about (or should care about) that involved others more than I.

It has been very helpful then to recall this saying and the social consequences of passivity. These thoughts together have led me to become actively engaged in the moment. As I now reflect on those many instances, I know my own life has been richer for not remaining a bystander.