Interconnections
“Appearance
is something absolute, but reality is not that way—everything is
interdependent, not absolute. So that view is very helpful to
maintain a peace of mind because the main destroyer of a peaceful
mind is anger.”
The
Dalai Lama
Several
times recently, Steven Johnson, author of the new book, How We Got
to Now, has been interviewed about the six inventions that, in
his view, changed the face of Earth. Not what you might expect,
actually; not the cotton gin, or the mechanized assembly line, or the
steam engine. One was the air conditioner. Modern home air
conditioning, invented by Willis Carrier in the early years of the
20th century, became common in the 1950's and, in America,
precipitated a massive migration of people to the south and
southwest. Cities like Phoenix, Houston, Miami and Atlanta grew
exponentially because folks could now live comfortably in places
previously too hot to bear. That movement of people literally changed
the map, the electoral college, and the politics of this country.
We
don't often think in these terms—how changes, large and small,
impact us all and create history in unexpected ways. Modern life is
so complicated and so interconnected that most of us have a hard time
wrapping our heads around it. Which, I think, is the root cause of
the polarization we're experiencing today. We can understand one pole
or the other—conservative/liberal, rich/poor, laborer/boss—but we
have difficulty seeing how they're interdependent—how one cannot
exist without the other.
In
our lives today, nothing is absolute; all people, events and
economies are interconnected. An impact on one causes repercussions
in the others. The more we bring that awareness to everything we do,
and to what we perceive to be differences, the better understanding
we will have of fairness, of justice, of what causes us to war, and
what may lead us to peace.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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