The world is divided into countries, races, religions, and god knows how many different factions and sections. There may be valid reasons for such sections. However, everything and everyone is connected. Problem to one results in problem to everything else around it. We have to learn the lesson of connectedness, be it hard way or easily.
Connectedness
Once different body parts were annoyed with the stomach. They were unhappy that they had to procure food and bring it to the stomach while the stomach itself did nothing but devour the hard work the parts did.
In a meeting, all body parts decided they will stop bringing food to the stomach. The hand won’t lift it to the mouth, teeth won’t chew and throat won’t swallow it. This would force the stomach into doing something.
After all, they were part of the whole. They had forgotten this basic reality. The decision to stop bringing food to the stomach resulted in making the body weak, feeble, and brought the body to the death bed.
In the end, they all learned a lesson that in helping one another they were really working for their own welfare.
Interdependence
I had written about witnessing an incident of rioting firsthand. The learning from that incident was that we must learn managing our emotions. We can learn this by learning meditations. In fact, meditation brings compassion too. Result – more balance and peaceful response to situation instead of rioting – “Connectedness“.
Recently, I heard of the news of riots in a city in Sweden. Similar things occurred in two of the biggest cities in India – Delhi, and Bangalore. In our selfishness, if we miss the connectedness we end up harming not just ourselves but the whole surrounding. In our shallowness, we may consider ourselves as different or separate from the other however this aloofness ends into troubling everything.
Note – Story source – Father Anthony de Mello, Prayers of the frog