Gift of Suffering

It is possible that all of the shit we have been through, our worst broken hearts, become in us our deepest pools of empathy.  This vital resource, our empathy, our humanity, is the connecting point between us and future generations.  Without human empathy we as a species loose the comforts of infancy, our family, our friends, our communities, our doctors. All connections in which we feel a familiarity and trust dissolve without our ability to relate.  Our empathy shines through our action when we understand and respond to one anothers needs.  It is only through cooperation across time that we are able to live today.  We alone did not build our homes, sew our clothing, or produce our fuel. Many people created this life, within our human society.  We were working together all this time without even being awake to the connection between our lives.  There are farmers in South Africa, and Chile, and the Central Valley in Mexico who produced with their human attention your food, and the food of your neighbors.  Still our clothing is sewn in the brutal human reduction of sweat shops.  Our insatiable demand for energy comes at the expense of energy field workers, international military troops, local cultures, and environmental integrity.  We are all doing this together.  We establish the pattern of human culture together as individuals constantly collaborating on a changing vision of what we really are.  And how can we know?  Sensitivity.  To ourselves, to others, to other life on this planet.  The suffering of the human experience is our que to remember who we really are and what is really happening on this planet.  We are biological electrical hydro sentient events.  We are alive.  If we were unable to feel pain, unable to hurt, or to understand the hurt of another person, how would we then act?  Where can a human ethic without feeling go?   We are fragile.  This is universal among is.  We can be killed.  And will ultimately die.  We have only this brief experience with one another. It is a rare opportunity in this universe to become aware of our own sensitive intelligence, and then to develop it. Many species evolve but I can see that we alone can decide in which mode we choose to evolve.  Our primary lighthouse through the storm of human evolution is our empathy to one another.  To feel as though the other is self, because though we are individual, there is ultimately nothing separating us.  We must be vigilant against those parts of ourselves that have become unfeeling, and perhaps fatigued in an apathetic world.  Look around you at each human face, know that if they were gone, the man at the gas station, the child at the park, the unknown strangers of this planet, you would miss them very much.  Together we are redefining what we are.