Most of us know that when you drop something into water, there are ripples. Depending on how large the body of water is, and how large the object dropped is, the ripples can be tiny or huge. I think that we all forget that we are like the object being dropped. Other people are the bodies of water. When we interact with others, we create ripples. We have no way to really tell how big or how small our ripples will be. We have no way of knowing what the other person's water is like (puddle or ocean?), but we do indeed have an effect on the other person.
So how differently might we all act if we thought about ripples first? We know that we are going to have an impact on other people, and we get to decide a little bit about how that impact will land. Do we throw out stone as hard as we can and how to make a big splash and ripple? Or do we drop the stone gently and hope for smooth ripples that might go on for a while? We can't choose how big the other person's water is, or how long our ripples will last, but we can decide how we are going to try and cause the ripples.