Fear not, Gentle Reader, I have not succumbed to the Pollyanna Kool-Aid. Notice that you will not find the H word (h@ppy) in the title? Today as I wandered from duty to duty and back again to the questionable comfort of my subsidized apartment (questionable because the drug-addicted douchebag in the hard-to-house building next door keeps cranking up his stereo this evening and it's a summer evening and I have to keep my window shut with the fan on, but here I digress) I was ruminating at times of just how interconnected we really are. All over the earth. It has been found that of all animals humans have the least variation of DNA among them (citation needed). Even within recognized racial groups there can be a greater genome difference than between persons of different races. It has sometimes been claimed that race is nothing more than a social construct. I think there is merit to this argument.
We are all related by blood. People continue to mate, marry, bear children, families and individuals of disparate origins are constantly joined, connected and united and reunited. We are also all connected by up to the famous six degrees of separation. We all know one another just as surely as we are all related. I am trying to keep this in mind as I go through my day, seeing, and sometimes interacting with strangers. It helps me to stay focussed on the good that unites us. (Okay, I did taste the Kool-Aid. But I didn`t swallow any. Promise.)
Of course, the vast majority of us wander through life not thinking of this, nor necessarily believing it. For the most part we see as relevant to us our immediate family, children, spouses, partners, lovers, friends, associates, coworkers. Everyone else is negotiable, or should I say user-friendly. They are the butcher (produce vendor for vegetarians), the baker (gluten-free if you prefer), the candlestick maker, the hairdresser, the grocery store checkout clerk, the service provider, the cabbie, the bus driver, the passenger sharing a seat with you. Those who are not there to provide us a service, or who are purchasing a service from us, those who are not there for our alleged convenience, comfort or wellbeing, they exist solely to be coped with and, if possible, avoided. Occasionally some of us will be struck by a burst of altruism: offering our seat on the bus; holding a door open, directing a fellow pedestrian to a sudden lost or fallen object; perhaps to tend to and administer first aid in an accident.
I think it is during those small sparks of goodness that we are reminded that we are all connected. We don't necessarily think of ourselves as all being of the same family, but, face it Sunshine, we are. I just don't think that a lot of us can cope with this information. We are generally so distracted getting on with our lives, or believing our own private myths about our lives that there is usually no room for others unless they impact us directly. In the meantime many of us treat our interactions from a consumer's perspective. Once a (pick any one) spouse, parent, child, lover, friend, associate has outlived their usefulness to us we tend to cast them aside for something new and improved. It doesn't always happen this way and thank heaven that there still remains within our dark, cramped, vile-smelling little souls some faint glimmer of light, goodness and love. We need only devise ways of summoning forth that glimmer till it fans to a flame.
Enjoy the Kool-Aid!
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