A snowflake landed on the surface of my glove as my best friend and I cruised through a steady snowfall on the lift.

We marveled at how perfect it was.

This one looked exactly as it’s drawn in animations — crystalline with eight symmetrical points.

I couldn’t believe it.

I thought about the perfection of nature, how it creates this beautiful detail of life which falls from the sky.

It’s said every snowflake is unique, right? How, when this snowflake seemed absolutely perfect, can all snowflakes be unique, individual, unlike any other?

This very one, in the mountains of an island in northern Japan, fell into my hand. This is the one, I thought.

Who else has felt this way? Anywhere across the globe, who else has found the perfect snowflake?

We’re the same as human beings. Nature told me something — in the middle of the night the thought clicked.

We’re individual amongst eight billion other individuals.

But all we need to be is what we are, and what we are is a chance to shift another world, as this seemingly random snowflake stirred mine.

It caused me to stop and think about the beauty, the perfection, the wonder of nature.

It caused me to perceive the meaning in it all.

Even in a snowstorm, perfect snowflakes fall.

It made me think about how magical life is, as I looked at the tiniest particle of ice in my hand, then gazed around at the endless falling snow, drifting and peaceful.

How many of those ice crystals wafting through the sky could have made me stop and think?

It was this one, and perhaps this one for a reason.

We don’t need to be the only perfect person, or the best, or better than anyone else.

We don’t need to be something we’re not.

Somewhere, for some reason, out in the depths of this mysterious world, we’re who we need to be, at a special time and place, in a body and soul which nobody else inhabits, or knows completely, with the power to change the world by believing that what we do no matter how small, matters.

With the age we live in, we compare ourselves to the perfection we see, people we’ll never meet, stars who seem bigger than the universe.

Instead of glowing as we are.

We’re a bunch of snowflakes,

falling from the sky,

drifting on a gust of wind.

Don’t fight the flow. Go where it takes you.

That single snowflake,

it found me for a reason.

Causing me to write this now.

Waves of inspiration emanate,

moments of love, no matter where we are resonate.

Don’t need to change the world.

Change your world, right where you are.

That has a greater effect than we can possibly understand.