I want to tell you one of my favourite stories.
It comes from a small Japanese island called Koshima, back in the 1950s. Researchers were leaving sweet potatoes out on the sand for the monkeys that lived there. The monkeys loved the potatoes, but not the grit.
Then one young monkey worked out something new. She carried her potato down to the water and washed the sand off before she ate it.
Her mother learned it from her. Her playmates learned it from them. One by one the young monkeys and their families began washing their food, until a good number of them were doing it.
And then something strange happened.
The story goes that once a certain number of monkeys had learned to wash their potatoes, almost as if an invisible line had been crossed, monkeys on entirely different islands began doing it too. Monkeys who had never met. Monkeys with no way to copy what they had never seen.
It was as though, once enough of them knew, the knowing itself spread.
People call this the hundredth monkey. The idea that there is a tipping point, a critical mass, where a new way of being stops belonging to a few and becomes part of the whole.
Whether it happened on those islands exactly as the story is told, I cannot prove to you. But I have watched this same thing happen in smaller ways my whole life.
An idea that was unthinkable in one generation becomes obvious in the next. Something only the mystics spoke of slowly becomes something ordinary people feel in their own kitchens.
Look at history. The world has never waited for everybody to change at once. It only ever needed enough of us to go first.
And here is why I am telling you this.
You do not have to wake the whole world. You were never meant to convince everyone, or fix everyone, or drag anyone into the light who is not ready.
You only have to be one of the ones who shifts.
When you do your own quiet inner work, when you choose love over fear in a moment nobody sees, when you sit in your half hour of stillness, it does not stop with you. It adds to the count.
You become one more monkey washing the sand off, and you never know if you are the hundredth.
We are spiritual beings choosing to be here to have a human experience, and we are doing it together, whether we feel it or not.
So keep going. Your change is never only your own.
Have you ever felt an idea or a mood move through a whole group of people, as though something shifted that nobody quite said out loud?
Come and tell me about it in the Perth Spiritual Learning group on Facebook.