Aren’t we all in this together? I find it fascinating how science increasingly confirms so many of the things humans have intuited spiritually, philosophically, and practically: our inter-connectedness.
How could it be otherwise? The person who uses a phone has to thank countless others through time who have offered their ingenuity, inventiveness, brain power, physical labor, and dedication toward creating such things. The business person who employs the countless tools of commerce owes a debt to previous and current other minds and bodies, as does the farmer, the beautician, the physician, the artist, the restaurateur, the banker, the truck driver.
None of us operates solely of our own accord untouched by others’ contributions. Neuroscience has proven that even the slightest communication between people simultaneously alters each’s neurochemical transactions. We are constantly influencing each other. We know that eye contact and an engaging tone with babies stimulates parts of their brains that allow for healthy development (and haven’t most of us known this before science proved it?). But this is also true at every age.
If one accepts then, the premise that we are all connected – that we are, in some sense, what Wallace Stegner calls “each other’s consequences” -then we might consider it our job, collectively, to help ensure that we are all taken care of regarding basic human needs – and even that we help to make it more likely that people will make productive and healthy decisions by assisting them: our children, other people’s children, our clients, our patients, our brothers and sisters, our employees, our neighbors, our loved ones, our fellow citizens. If will positively affect them, and thus, it will positively affect us.
Might that not just be our modus operandi: that we as individuals – and as a society – recognize at all times and in all places our inter-connectedness, and thereby look for and follow through with ways in which we can lift up, aid, protect, and support our fellow beings – as individuals, as organizations, as businesses, as governing policy.
What a different world it would be – and someday, may be.
It’s fitting today to quote Dr. Martin Luther King: “It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one destiny, affects all indirectly.” The butterfly effect is real. When we help even one person do better, we ultimately help us all.
