Miraculousness is a Real Word (I Looked It Up)

I went to a bookstore today and as I was browsing around, I was amazed at how many books there were, how many books on the subjects that I am interested in and how many books about things I don’t care about at all, but someone cared enough about to write a book.  There are whole sections of the bookstore that I skip right by, but someone else goes to the bookstore and that’s where they go straightaway.

I think about this all the time—how everyone is living in a completely unique universe.  I think about it when I’m on Facebook—everyone’s newsfeed is different.  I have overlap in “Friends” with lots of people, but no one has exactly the same conglomeration as me, so no one has the same experience as me and gets the exact same news as me when they are on Facebook.

My husband is the person I spend the most time with, but the percentage of time that we are apart is pretty big, and when you consider our whole lives, there is a very small place of intersection between his life and my life.  We live in completely different universes with a small area of overlap, which we are both looking at from our own perspective.  It really kind of blows my mind.

For me, awareness of the gigantic differences in people—the differences in experiences, in interests, in priorities, in everything—helps me to have more compassion, which is the positive side of ahimsa or non-violence.  When I remember that no one else has had my exact life, I don’t wonder why other people don’t do what I would do or say what I would say.  Everyone in the world is a completely unique person, living their completely unique life and instead of being frustrated by that, I can be fascinated by the miraculousness.

Once upon a time, in my eHarmony days, I was matched up with this very conservative guy (I don’t know what that says about eHarmony) and we talked on the phone once or twice.  I remember him saying that while he really believed in his perspective, he was glad that there were people who were liberal, because it wouldn’t work if everyone were conservative.  That has always stuck with me.  Most of us want everyone to be the same as us, in some way.  We think people should believe what we believe, look at things the way we look at them.  But it wouldn’t work.  How would the world run if everyone were like me?  It wouldn’t work.  Plus it would be boring.