We all have at least once attended a funeral of an acquaintance. Very often it is a moving event, that person may have passed on during their youth without fulfilling their dreams or left behind a family; they may even have fallen victim to an illness.
The memorial service usually brings together hundreds of people, hundreds of the most diverse people you could imagine.
School teachers, fishermen, nurses, rich, poor, young, old. The spiritual and the non-spiritual.
And the one thing you overhear more than once is, “You knew him/her too”?
There’s nothing like a death to reveal the intricate web of personal connections we are all a part of.
At that moment, the surface differences that had kept these people from meeting each other in the past, melted away when they discovered their common bond with the deceased.
During that event, all you focus on is their similarity. Facing death makes our connections to everyone else become visible and our differences become invisible.
Why can’t we carry that vision throughout our everyday life?
Our society has a bad habit. A habit of looking for our differences instead of looking for our similarities.
And we always see what we look for. If each of us had the strength to ignore the impulses of others around us and upon meeting others asked ourselves: “How are they similar to me?” instead of “How are they different?” not only would we get along better with others, but we would gather the side benefit of getting along better with ourselves.
It’s true. Our minds work like this: if I’m upset with you, I’m the one who gets to feel the upset. If I enjoy our similarities, I’m the one who gets to feel that enjoyment.
What I do to you affects me.
What you do to me, affects you.
What we do to others affects us.
In reality, by focusing on our differences, all we are doing is making ourselves feel miserable!
Facing the death of another is a wake-up call to our undeniable similarities.
We are all from the same source. We are all doing the best we can with the resources we have.
Underneath those differences we have focused so intently on, we are all really the same.
Believing we are different only leads to one destination, misery. Must it take a funeral to get us to think differently?
