You are Me

No matter what any of us believe about the origin of our illustrious species, one thing is sure: we all emanate from one single source. We are family, we are connected. The dirt, slime or whatever that was used to make you was also used to make me, and that muck will mingle once again when our souls have done with it forever and it’s left lying around, waiting to be politely disposed of by our succeeding generations, our children, our dust.

So we are more than just like each other; in a sense we are each other, all made from the same batch of cookie dough. When a baker mixes flour, sugar, eggs, butter and whatever else, the option is there to either make one big cake or to spoon the sugary sludge into separate cases and make individual cup cakes, but it’s all the one dough whichever way it’s poured. We are all individual people made out of one big batch of cookie dough.

And we all breathe the same air. I suck in what you’ve just blown out. We all inhale what at one time inflated Hitler’s lungs; Bin Laden lives off what I’ve just released into the atmosphere. – in an immeasurably diluted form of course, but that’s how it is.

When we swim we do so in water mixed with the sweat that washes off our fellow swimmers’ bodies and we drink it down. In that same pool we swallow skin that flakes off other people’s feet. Many of us have someone else’s blood coursing through our veins, some pee via another person’s kidney. Hearts and livers, even eyes and now faces are given and received.

We are one. Our concern should therefore be for each other, to weep with those who weep and laugh with those who laugh. If you bleed it is part of me that becomes anaemic, when you lose your job I should feel the pain in my own heart. If I fall ill you should be involved even maybe to the point of experiencing sympathetic symptoms of my affliction. When one hurts we should all feel damaged.

Image via Wikipedia

Yet strangely we live in an age of the individual, the era of separation Largely gone in many places is the extended family, the local community. In many cities the lone apartment dweller prizes disconnectedness and views it as success. Not knowing your neighbours is a matter of pride, not regret. We pick and chose our friends according to our needs rather than fostering relationships that we were born into.

And if we are one in our suffering, if we feel genuine oneness with victims, surely we must also recognise a oneness with the causers of suffering. Not an approving or excusing oneness of course, but if one part of the cookie dough is capable of murder then am I not capable too, maybe even culpable?

You could push all this to the point of ridiculous frivolity, but let’s face it, we’re in this thing together and we belong together.

http://www.authspot.com/Short-Stories/Moonshine.780527