The Luckiest People

Do you remember Junior High School? Who doesn't. It's the one time in our personal history when a titanic alignment of influences create seismic events. Puberty. Peer pressure. Parents. Pimples. How desperately we wanted to fit in in the face of how everything conspired against us to keep it from happening. Sometimes you felt like the red-headed step-child nobody wanted.
The old song from the musical "Funny Girl", sung by Barbra Streisand said it well:

People who need people
Are the luckiest people in the world
We're children needing other children
And yet letting our grown-up pride
Hide all the need inside
Acting more like children than children...

We do really need each other. Desperately. It's tragedies like the Boston Marathon bombing that remind us how much we are all in this together. How much we depend on one another. We see the better angels of our nature in times like this and it reminds us of our common humanity, linked by twenty three chromosomes and five quarts of blood.

It's easy to judge one another. Like falling off a log easy. Maybe it's an on board software construct in our internal navigational computers. In a microsecond we size one another up and decide everything we ever want to know about that person.

“To love is to recognize yourself in another,” Eckhart Tolle said. He wasn't talking about eye color or the shape of someone's smile. He was talking about the very essence, down past all the flesh and blood and personality to the very Core of a person's Being. Down at that level, behind the chromosomes, at the level of consciousness, we are brothers and sisters. At the quantum level we are energy together.

This is hard for me to handle sometimes, especially when someone is acting in a way it makes me want to rip my hair out. Cutting me off in traffic, for example. My natural instinct is to label the guy "a jerk". It happens in a microsecond. Yet if I knew that guy was racing desperately to the hospital because his little kid is clinging to life, my attitude would change in a heart beat.

You and I, we need one another. Life can be cruelly unfair. Buildings collapse on women while sitting quietly sewing clothes, trying to make the thirty-seven dollars a month it takes to feed her family. Kids are gunned down in elementary schools and street corners with horrifying frequency. Old men are left to rot on street corners and filthy, icy tenements or lonely nursing homes.

If you need other people, you are lucky. If they need you, so are they.