I've mentioned Dr. Elizabeth Sawin before. She's a synthesizer and a systems thinker.
Today she had a short thread that was helpful to me in the midst of our trip to hell in a handbasket. It's not her own words, though, but those of her mentor, Donella Meadows, writing in an essay called "Lines in the Mind":
If you are on the other side of the planet, if I don’t know your name, if you speak a language I don’t understand, even then, when I see a picture of your face, full of joy, I feel your joy. When your face shows suffering, I feel that too. Even when I try not to. Especially then.
Don’t you know what she is talking about? What does this observation tell us about ourselves? And how many billions have been spent subverting this ability to feel connection?
How many political empires and military training protocols, propaganda blitzes and educational pedagogies have been devoted to stamping it out, at least as concerns certain groups deemed “other.”
Sometimes I think that what we really need to find the way out of our climate and other predicaments is to “just” bolster and believe in that within us which is good, and whole, and designed to connect.
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