I have a friend named Sarah who is doing all she can to save the world. She's a consultant to nonprofit aid agencies, primarily in Africa: she's lived in Darfur in the middle of the refugee camps, surrounded by millions of starving people; in the Sudan in the middle of the drought, in Chad, where the genocide had spread. She does all she can, but even Sarah sometimes stays awake at night with all that's left to be done.

I'm lucky to be surrounded by people who care passionately about the world and making it better, though most of them do it in less dramatic ways than Sarah. My brother and his wife are medical residents, and their schedules and all they've had to sacrifice in the past ten years has convinced me that (Nip and Tuck aside) nobody goes into medicine without having a deep desire to help people, to fix them, or to ease their pain. They are quiet heroes, the people who work themselves to the bone in order to alleviate suffering on this everyday level.

I've been feeling, recently, frozen--there's so much to do in the world, so much to fight against that I'm just bewildered. Not only do I not know where to put my energies, I have no idea how to do it. I want to help the world; I have no idea how to begin. And I don't think I'm alone--for all the Dave Eggers and Brad Pitts in the world, who give so much (to teach literacy and help Sudanese Lost Boys; to build post-Katrina houses in New Orleans, respectively), there must be hundreds--maybe millions--of me. People who sincerely desire to do good, who are so lost they have no idea how. Who get so worried about answering emails and doing the laundry that they misplace their good intentions.

And so, now to George Eliot, to whom I turn when feeling the need for wisdom. Middlemarch is by far my favorite book--I try to read it every few months, slowly; I'm in love with George Eliot's mind. I read today:

"I have a belief on my own, and it comforts me...that by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil--widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower."

I love this idea. It doesn't absolve my ineffectiveness, but I think it is true that the mere desire for good is a help. At least, it will keep us from making the world worse by poor or indifferent decisions; and it may begin to thaw those of us who have been frozen by fear and bewilderment.

I love grand gestures, but the understanding that I can't solve the world's ills all at once is helping to make me move; maybe I can start smaller, it says; maybe all you need is the will to help. Everything else, perhaps, can stem from that.