You don't actually know whether you have done anything important or not. You may have influenced people in ways you know nothing about, About a year ago, I heard, quite by chance, from a the daughter of a man close to death, that I had had a big influence on this man's friend 30 years ago. I remember meeting his friend, a nice guy who took me and my husband out for a day on his boat, but that was the only time I ever met him and I had no idea at all that I had influenced him. And were it not for the fact that this guy had mentioned it to someone else, who happened to pass on the message to his own daugther when he was dying, and that she decided to pass it on to me, I would never have known. You must have met hundreds of people in your own life, and you really have no idea what effect you have had on most of them. It can go the other way too. What someone thinks of as his great achievement might turn out, in the long run, to have been such a disaster that it would have been better if that person had never lived. (The names Hilary Koprowski and Paul Osterreith come to mind here.) The world is too big and too complicated for it to be worth worrying about matters like that. In the meantime, if you want to try to do someting useful, the suggestion above by lotus-flowers is probably as good a suggstion as you are likely to get.
