Sometimes I feel like life is a game put together by supernatural forces and all they do to us is just for their amusement or a mere show of power. But even at that, it still feels like their twisted sense of humour gave us something good to help us cope.
When I observe people, their ways, their likes, their wants and interests, I can’t help but wonder if all is just an intricate web designed to make a person unique. You would never find someone who has something unique to them alone in the whole world, however when you check the combination of the similarities in random orders, it makes a person unique.
But this is what begs the question of ‘nature versus nurture’ in psychology. Are we the product of our biochemical make up or of our environment and things we were exposed to growing up, and every day?
The focus for now however is on the similarities in our uniqueness. What that means in simple term is this:
We Are Not Alone.
The assurance of this can be found in the little things. I remember a day I was discussing with a friends and I was trying to find the right words to explain how I felt about a particular topic. While I was struggling with that, he started sharing his own thoughts and how he felt about the same thing, and I remember just staring at him and nodding because what he was saying was a clear reflection of what was inside me, and it felt as if he was reading my mind like a book.
Now this same friend, we share so little things in common, our taste in music, way of life, how we generally see and interpret things are very different, but still in that little moment, one of the little things that make us up became alike, and for a brief moment in time, we were in sync.
This is just an instance out of many others on different levels and complexities.
So What is The Point?
Why are we alike in the little things even though we are unique as a whole?
I think the reason is simple. Life is too complicated to have to go through everything all alone.
Someone else has been where we are now. But the real beauty is that, some people got through it, so there is hope for us.
Very few of us acknowledge how alike we are, and even fewer of us take advantage of this gift of similarity.
By default, humans put of a wall around themselves. The walls are so fancy and so high like a castle’s that it would be difficult to see the ruins of the castle and the tender garden within it.
We all need help rebuilding and fortifying our castle, and help tending our gardens. The cement you need to hold the next brick down and the spade to dig up your garden can be found in the barred up walls around you outside your castle wall.
Not until we break the walls down can we see how alike we are and that someone else has the right tool we need.
As Jalaluddin Rumi said, “Your task is not to find love, but merely to seek and find the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
The purpose of having so many little details that make us up is so that we get the chance to interact and connect with so many people.
Why?
It is part of what makes humans superior to other animals — our ability to connect with other people on a level that transcends the present. We can look back in time and connect with others who have gone through what we are going through and draw strength from it, to learn lessons so as to avoid pitfalls ahead of us, and to hold each other’s hands as we walk up the rocky path of life.
The advantage of our similarities can be an advantage to anyone who looks beyond their uniqueness and sometimes focus on the little similarities they share with others, because this is one of the free gifts of life to us and it all starts with bringing down the barriers and allowing ourselves to see a bit of ourselves in others.
