Everlasting Kindness

Being a new father, I have made the transition from my life being about me to my life being about someone else, my son. It is something I think most if not all parents experience.

In actuality, our lives really aren’t about us at all. And this applies even mores to non parents. Once we are gone, all of the “things” we work so hard to accumulate pass on to someone else or are destroyed. They never were ours to begin with. What endures is what we give to others, the knowledge, the opportunities, the kindness, the legacy that we pass on.

That’s what makes us humans great.

When I interviewed James Fowler, he talked about people being a “super-organism” that individuals are just like cells in a much larger being, something greater: our family, the company we work for, the city we live in, our country and ultimately the world. We die, but what lives on is this larger being, this super organism.

Our things, our knowledge, our accomplishments pass between people, like nutrients between cells, to feed the super organism.

From that perspective, the cells in our “human” body, the ones that do what they want with a disregard to our health are called cancer. And we do everything we can to cut them out of our body and kill them.

Don’t think that the super organism is any different.

So from that perspective, maybe we ought to stop acting like cancer and start passing nutrients on to others and nourish the super organism.