Picture this.
You are sitting on the couch. It's a Thursday night, and you are watching your favorite television show, when the commercials start. You get up decide to grab a snack. From your kitchen, you hear the clip for the evening news report as you put some popcorn in the microwave. The clip says that someone has just lost their life in a car accident, but you pay no attention to it or the rest of the commercials, only returning to your couch once the commercials have ended.
Now, Picture this.
Someone is sitting on the couch. It's a Thursday night, and they are watching their
favorite television show, when the commercials start. They get up decide
to grab a snack. From their kitchen, they hear the clip for the evening
news report as they put some popcorn in the microwave. The clip says that
someone has just lost their life in a car accident, but they pay no
attention to it or the rest of the commercials, only returning to their couch once the commercials have ended.
You were in the car.
In life, humans like to distance themselves from the bad: illness, heartbreak, poverty, depression, death, ect.It's a defense mechanism, a way to ensure our own safety and optimum happiness, by avoiding the qualities of life that trigger unhappiness. So, if something or someone doesn't concern us, we simply don't worry about it/them. So if when we hear the negative, for example, someone died, we brush them off our shoulder and worry not. But in this process, we De-humanize other human beings. How else would we make it through our days? Bad things happen all the time, and they happen to everyone. If we worried about everything, we would make ourselves sick. We assume that if we don't care or take action, that someone else will, but the thing is, how many other people share this thought? If everyone isn't caring, because they know someone else will care for them, who is that someone?
Our lives our layered upon each others, and, like it or not, we will always be linked to everyone, including the people we never encounter. The world is a neighborhood and we are all members of it's community. Everyone on earth is your neighbor, and my moral is that you should treat them the way you wish to be treated. Do the best you can to help out, lend a listening ear, or offer a second's worth of sympathy, because you never know when you could be the person on the couch, or the person in the car.
I never though about it this way. I guess you could say I'm pretty good at the whole defense mechanism and trying not to worry about other peoples problems, or my own, because they all feel the same to me. From this though I'm realizing there can be more of a balance and that while you don't have to cry all day for other people and worry sick over them, you can support them and help out to the best of your ability. Community is huge in my life, where I came from was very small, close and supportive, so looking at this big picture-the earth- it brings a whole new way of approaching everyday life.
ReplyDeletethanks :)
Thank you for commenting!!!!!!! :)And I see were you are coming from, the trick is to find the balance!
DeleteThe first part of this post really got to me. Actually, I loved this entire post. It was a new way of looking at things that I never really considered before. This is really inspiring, and I'm going to try thinking this way (that everyone is connected), rather than being detached from the rest of the world.
ReplyDeleteIt's a hard concept to grasp, I don't completely get it myself, but everyone is connected even if we don't see the connection ourselves.
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