A preface to lunch We stand on shaking ground

Author: James O'Brien

I've decided to begin this week with two moralizing haikus.

Some animals watch The other animals fall,
Happy it's not them.

The frog eats the fly.
The frog is suddenly scared-
Prays for its frog soul.

These haikus, besides being quaint and amusing, are meant to illustrate a topic that has been on my mind for awhile - individuality. Please, do not be an individual. I care about you.

Remember the story of George Washington and his honesty regarding that felled cherry tree? Or the Boy Who Cried Wolf? As children, these stories taught us lessons about honesty. They taught this lesson, which our society thought we should know - if you tell the truth, your Dad will hug you. If you lie, wolves will eat you. As we got older, we realized that these scenarios were a bit over the top, but they did teach us a general rule about how society feels about lying. Today we still learn from certain books, but we mostly just sop up the culture around us. We receive a loud and clear message that we are individuals in constant competition for a pot of gold.

This pursuit of an end goal can tire us out, and sometimes we just want to take the weight of being an individual off of our shoulders. When people want to feel like part of a whole rather than a single human being, I think the first thing that they turn to is religion or spirituality (and when I say spirituality, I mean some sort of activity that tends to give us a sense of relative insignificance, and subsequently, peace). It probably seems paradoxical that insignificance can bring us peace, but I think it is a sense that we are part of some greater system at work takes a bit of the pressure off.

Often spirituality can take the form of practicing music or basketball. It could be taking a walk with a mentor. But whatever it is, it helps us to put ourselves in the context of the world as a whole. It helps us to feel small for a moment and still be happy. In terms of my own spirituality, when I was younger, it took the form of Roman Catholicism. Consequently I've come to find how Church teaching can inadvertently lead toward a goal-oriented life. While Catholicism certainly promotes helping your fellow human beings, it also emphasizes that your reward for doing so is individual salvation. We are trained to look for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and completely overlook the rainbow itself. I'm not sure exactly who decided it and when, but American culture, like my Sunday school books, seems to teach us that we need to invent a pot of gold because the rainbow just isn't good enough.

We might just be willing to say, "Oh well. That's the way things are. Plus, I like gold, because it is shiny, and I hate rainbows, because I once had a bad experience I don't want to talk about." Fair enough. But I think many of us have bought into the idea of being individuals without even knowing it. It doesn't exactly have to be this way. It would be just as easy to see ourselves as part of a whole if that was the way our culture operated. Rather than the spotlight always being on you, perhaps it could shift to others in your life. Your focus could truly be on the idea of the people themselves rather than what you get from them and what they get from you, physically and emotionally. You may think that you do this already, but think about it for a second. There are times when people lose their humanity in our minds only to become a means to an end. If we could only view our school and our world as one whole entity, this almost-innocent selfishness we've fallen into could be thrown out the window.

The idea of going through life as a solo journey is an unsatisfying one. Granted, we are physically confined to our own individual minds and bodies. We are unable to truly understand what another person is thinking, but the communication aspect of living, that act of crossing the divide, is life. Communication is not a means to something else, and we are not individuals but an interconnected whole. It is not an idea that can be proven, I assume, but try thinking about life in that way for a second just to see how our ideas about individuality, no matter what they are, are not intrinsic. They are contingent on our upbringing and the essence of competition around us. What if we all exist as one living, breathing entity? Maybe this is what my old friend Jesus meant when he said, "Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, you do to me."

The world may be static, but it is our perception of it which affects our actions. So if we view ourselves as individuals responsible for achieving status, money or most poor people served, we've actually learned our lesson well. We can, however, choose to be poor students and reject that lesson. We can choose to consider ourselves part of a whole. Believe it or not, there is a way to enjoy the rainbow, and it tastes just as good as it looks. Just ask Skittles.

James O'Brien is an English major from Medfield, Mass.