Mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually, you are unparalleled and without equal. No one else but you have your body shape, gait, fingerprints, or ear shape. Nor have they the same DNA unless you are an identical twin.
Irrespective of whether you are an identical twin or not, your brain, with its neurons and blood vessels, controls your bodily functions in a manner that is singular to you. Your brain waves are one of a kind, however, the connectome of your brain has a conspicuous similarity to the workings of the galaxy within which you live. This similarity cannot be ignored since your brain is also a custom-made physical foundation and custodian of your idiosyncratic mind. A phenomenon that is still far from understood.
Your mind is the intangible aspect of your being, your inner unique self. It not only generates and encompasses your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and experiences but is responsible for all of which creates who you are, none of which are the same as anyone else’s.
Likewise, your consciousness, another complex-systems phenomenon, is a naturally occurring, physically emergent process that enables a subjective awareness of self, unique to you. It is moulded and informed by your senses and influences your experiences and perceptions, which only you and no one else has.
Your perception processes the information gathered through your senses from the world around you to form the fundamentals of critical thinking. It enables you to look at things with a unique objectiveness, which shapes your decision-making. To ensure accurate, unbiased objectivity, you need to be self-aware, especially of your limitations, in other words, your weaknesses as well as strengths.
In other words, you are an island, and you stand alone in your uniqueness, which also isolates you. A singular isolation that, in its moment, can haunt you into questioning why you sometimes feel so alone when you are surrounded by those you love and who love you.
A question the answer to which awakens your greater awareness and leads you to the realization that your uniqueness results in the fact that no one can truly, know or understand you because they are not you, any more than you can truly know, and understand another as much as you would like to believe, simply because you are not them.
At that moment, you are connected to your singularity at a profound level, which exposes the common denominator that unites you with everyone else: everyone is unique.
It’s the experience of living as a unique person that unifies you with billions of other people. Uniqueness runs through humanity, uniting what would otherwise be a species of individual dissimilar. Yet it is a type of uniqueness that enables the process of similarities to take place, producing social connections and creating a common ground that allows for likes and dislikes, loves and hates, actions and inactions, beliefs and disbeliefs, all of which mean something different to everyone.
Each social connection is an invisible bridge built from empathy, a cognitive emotion that connects you to another because empathy is crucial to your survival.
Each time you make a crossing; you create a new experience in the form of collective interests to which you respond in your unique way. Your and everyone else’s responses are equivalent to you receiving essential foods for your brain, which are comprised of new information, experience, knowledge, and ideas, all of which represent people’s different perspectives and all of which unite you and them in one way or another.
However, whether you cross one or a thousand bridges in your lifetime, you are and always will be an island surrounded by billions of other islands. Even so, the bridges you and others build form a unified mass of tied islands of humanity. Unity is found within different common grounds, yes, but not all common grounds are unified with each other, thus preserving your and everyone else’s uniqueness.
During this process, you meet a fellow isolated islander, some of whom you will warm to and get on with and others you won’t, but you learn from everyone. You learn about how both positive and challenging people influence how you respond, resulting in your perception changing, which enables your awareness to increase, which expands your mind, leaving you in your island state free to grow, evolve, and empower.
Although empowerment is an internal and, therefore, solitary process, it is reliant on external action and activities that involve other people. Without empowerment, humanity itself can’t unite, the true meaning of which is that if you look for it there is always peace in the presence of conflict; you will find that love does reside in the presence of hatred; and that it is within you to forgiveness in the presence of harm and injury.
The evolution and empowerment of the human condition is a humungous task in which you and everyone else as unique individuals have a vital role to play. It’s a stand-alone role that you can’t perform unless you are prepared to build and walk over your bridges of empathy with an open mind, understanding, tolerance, a higher understanding of acceptance, and, above all, compassion in your heart.
These are the tools you need when meeting other islands and creating a united front, a type of power of unity that can’t be defeated, a power that you can draw upon as and when you need as you live your life standing alone, despite the presence of all of those around you.
Article by Elizabeth Francis
More to Life Elder
Article published in More to Life – Edition 70
