Connecting to the Broken World

This is an old essay, but I saw people linking to it a lot after the election, and it feels kind of timeless in a broken world. I think the world is possibly always broken — at least for someone — and it behooves us to remember that. It’s still a broken world if it’s broken for one person, and our job is to remember that brokenness, even if it’s not broken for us.

I think the thing that stood out to me was that most of us would agree that we’d rather live in a community vs. on our own. We have the choice to remove ourselves from the world and cut ourselves off from the internet and consuming other people’s content or eating food made from ingredients provided through the world of other people and… well, you get it.

You’re reading this, which means you are connecting to the world. You are not shutting yourself off from the world; you’re letting it in every time you read or listen or see or eat or touch something created by another person. That is why we live in communities; to benefit from one another and not have to support our existence without other individuals.

The essay writer states: “I don’t know how to convince someone how to experience the basic human emotion of empathy.” We are all one choice, one action, one moment away from living a very different existence — one that someone else is living right now. And it would help if we remembered that as we move through this world. The point of community is so we can be there for each other vs. trying to do everything on our own.