A THOUSAND INVISIBLE THREADS

Over the years teaching high school students and even with my own children, one of the most difficult concepts they had was comprehending how everything they do, somehow in some way sooner or later, has an effect on everyone else. They just did not seem to feel that they were that important or that their actions were all that significant to anyone else, sometimes even to them.

Of course, they were not the only ones who had such a problem. It’s not a teenage problem. If we are honest, we will have to admit that most of us tend to live in our own little corners of the world and like it that way. And in those corners we sometimes allow ourselves to become so isolated that we cannot comprehend how anything we do will have much effect on anyone else let alone the rest of the world.

Herman Melville once observed: "We cannot live for ourselves. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these fibers our actions run as causes and return as results." It truly is sometimes difficult to comprehend how our small, insignificant lives and what we do in those lives can have any real effect on anyone else let alone the rest of the world.

Because of that we all too easily either make light of our own actions – good or bad or in-between – or down play their significance until they come back to either honor us or haunt us. Then, for better or for worse, it is too late. Would that we would be more aware of just how connected, interconnected, we are one to another. Imagine what that would mean to us and to the world!

Imagine what it would mean to us, to those closest to us, to everyone else, if, before we did or said anything, we first comprehended – or at least tried to – the consequences of our actions. Imagine! It would mean that the good we do would certainly be done better enabling more and better results to occur. It would mean that the bad we do would either not take place at all or, if it did, would be less consequential. Imagine!

But we don't do that imagining because it is too difficult to comprehend. It takes too much work. It places too much responsibility on our own shoulders and in our own consciences. At least that is my excuse. Excuses, good or bad, are simply that. They still cannot deny the reality of our interconnectedness. We may not see those thousands of invisible threads, but they are there and they are real. The bad that we did hurt more than those we intended it to hurt and the good we did helped more than the person or persons we were helping.

It is only when we, you and I, begin to become more aware of our individual responsibilities one to another and beyond and begin to take those responsibilities much more seriously in our daily lives that our lives and those of others will change for the better. Like those invisible threads the change may be imperceptible and, for the most part most of the time they will be, but they will also be real, very real. And that is what ultimately matters.