You Are Not An Island

"No man is an island entire of itself;..."

I have been thinking today of compassion, consideration, understanding, and forgiveness.  These ideas are difficult in many ways, and trying to find the right words to explain my vision of them has proven far more difficult than I'd imagined when I began.  I kept coming back to the idea that the things we do and say in life have a way of reverberating in the world around us--that whether or not you wish to accept the social contract of the world in which we live, you are still part of it, and thus still responsible for what occurs within it.

I struggled with the idea of forgiving those who have no remorse for their actions, and then remembering a story in which a Holocaust survivor said that forgiveness wasn't about excusing someone else's actions, but rather a statement that their actions no longer had any control over us.  Still the government that hurt her (and many others,) suffered a resounding defeat in WWII.  I have to imagine that made forgiveness easier for her.

I considered the idea of compassion for others and ourselves, and that mingled with the idea of understanding--trying to place ourselves in the shoes of others.  We are the center of our own universe, so it's hard to put ourselves at the center of someone else's.  But it is essential if we intend to share this world together.

I recalled an article about the social contract when it came to something as simple as returning a cart at the grocery store, and how often we fail at doing that.  How, then, can we expect people to do other little things like recycling?  Consideration in the little things must then lead to consideration when it comes to even greater things.

I reflected on my own lack of knowledge about the world and history--how these things can offer context and clues as to what works in life and what doesn't.  And I realized that being open to new information has helped me to shape my views on the world--how each new piece of information that I have acquired has helped me to become a better person because I am better able to understand others.  The more I have closed myself off from the world, the darker it became.  The easier it was to be afraid and to hate.  And so knowledge leads to understanding, which in turn leads to hope.

But the main thing that all of those ideas had in common was how they were tied to this notion that our lives are not lived in a vacuum.  We are not islands entire to ourselves.  The choices we make have repercussions.  And the things we do and say have consequences.  That is why it is so important to seek out knowledge that we may better understand (this life, ourselves, others;..) so that, maybe the only thing we will need to forgive is ourselves when we fail in that.