Connected

This is an excerpt from a book I read and loved, Unfinished Business by Lee Kravitz. I believe it is an important book, more so now, as things start to unravel and fall apart. Most of us have walled ourselves off behind a thousand little things we put off...bit by bit the guilt grows and we go into denial rather than take these apart, one by one and deal with them.


Albert Einstein once said that "A human being is part of a whole, called by us 'Universe,' a part limited by time and space."

Yet we experience our thoughts and feelings as "something separate from the rest." Einstein viewed this self-centric way of looking at the world as "a kind of optical delusion."

Time and again, I became aware of my "optical delusions" created unfinished business for me. I was convinced that Anita would get sad, that John was still mad, and that Andre wouldn't remember me, so I put off seeing them. But when I reached out to them it turned out that the opposite was true; Anita was delighted to see me again, John had absolutely no memory of the six hundred dollars I owed him, Andre remembered me and my fastball too. I had avoided approaching these people because I could only see their thoughts and feelings through a single lens - my own. Einstein considered our optical delusions "a kind of prison...Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." When we keep our promises, when we bury our grudges, when we make a point of being thoughtful and kind, when we really listen to what other people are saying, our circle widens to embrace more people. I might not have embraced the whole of nature, but I found myself in a much richer place - that of true human connectedness.