The Thread That Connects Us All

Have you ever met someone and thought, “Wow, I literally could not be more different from this person.”? Or when you watched the Ted Bundy documentary did you ever think, “how is this guy a person? Literally how? This is insane!”? Or a little less extreme, do you ever feel so out of place somewhere like you’re a circle in a world of squares, and it’s just like… well… I don’t know how I can relate to these people and this feels super weird and uncomfortable. Yea, I get that.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the thread that connects us all. Being a person is a unique experience relative to other living and non-living things, for a lot of reasons, one of which is our ability to relate to other people. It sounds cliché, I know, but clichés are cliché for a reason, most of the time they’re true. We can be close friends with people, love them deeply, or hate them strongly, or feel completely apathetic towards them. We can be kind, be spiteful, offend, apologize, forgive, the list never ends. We have meaningful relationships, or interactions at the very least, with each other.

We’re all connected. It’s our humanity that deeply connects us all. The connections may not be equal, but they are all deep. They all run to the core of who we are - humans. Before anything else, you’re human. We’re connected to the people we love, as well as the people we hate. It’s important to understand that: at our core, we are all human. That gives us room to understand, to forgive, to love deeper. When we understand that we share the same core, we’re all imperfect people, we can begin to climb out of ‘us vs. them,’ and we can move towards, ‘okay this is the reality of the world we live in, this is the reality of who we are, and this is how we can make it better.’. It makes the world better when we love our enemies, it makes the world better when we are united, it makes the world better when we fight for each other, not against each other.

Image obtained from Squarespace