privileged

My dentist chatted with me the other day, said his little daughter just learned from school that "there are so many people in the world!": One point four billion in India, ten million in Czechia (where the dentist's wife came from), and here in the US we have over three hundred million people... So many, she was amazed, and so few of them she knew or would ever know, she thought.

That triggered a tiny old memory of mine: As a young boy, I once saw a calendar poster on the wall, a blown-up tourism photo of sorts, showing a Parisian city scene, the Eiffel tower in the back, people strolling around on streets, parks, buildings, etc... And there, a young woman walking up some steps caught my eyes, and caused me to think: this is a real person... what happened to her after this picture was taken... where is she now... what's her life story like...

I came from a sentimental culture of the old, I remember on the day we finished our grade school, they had us kids grouped up and circle around the school yard while the PA speakers played some melancholy "I am going to miss all my dear teachers and classmates" music that actually made some of us twelve-year-olds cry...

Fast forward more than half a century later, I've come half a world to reside in a New World, picked a career path that took me traveling seven seas and five continents, met multitudes of people of various creeds and cultures, ethnicities and origins. And though most of these encounters were transitional or transactional and went by fast, a few of them did stick out.

Like the Russian "handler" that accompanied me through Moscow-Saint Petersburg-South Russia for my one-man technical show for two weeks, the "boys and girls" Japanese support team a Canadian and I used in our multi-city tele-promotion campaigns off and on for three years in Japan, and those young-and-restless, rebel-with-some-vague-cause computer whiz kids I recruited and "managed" for one and a half year for my startup company... Where have they all gone and how are they doing now, I sometimes wonder.

There is an old Chinese/Buddhism notion called 緣 (yuan), the serendipitous encounter between people and things, that seems both chancy and destined, unexplainable but meaningful, that ought to be taken blissfully.

Indeed, out of trillions of stars and planets in the cosmos, billions of people on Earth, what are the odds I meet these few people through this limited life span of mine, be it my blood-related family members, lifetime partner of my choosing, people I go to school with, seekers in the same pursuit, neighbors next door, fellow travelers I met at tours, lecturers whose teaching I enjoyed... my dentist.

"What a privilege to know you," I said to him.
 
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We humans are competitive animals, vying for resources, amassing fortunes, optimizing our own wellbeing... But don't blame me for it, blame it on my "selfish gene", that since day one has commanded all the cells in my body to take all the nutrients they can, grow bigger and fatter, get smarter and shrewder, gain advantages in the world, so I can pass down that same gene to my offspring, so it can start reproducing and multiplying again, over and over... It's just the law of nature.

But hold on, isn't that the same gene that also instructs my cells to differentiate, to become specialty organs that work together to make my body a functional whole? Isn't this cooperative, holistic, interdependent working between protein, cells, organism also a natural law in action, and a more intelligent and elegant version than the brute force grow-and-multiply-at-all-cost one mentioned earlier?

Further, those competitive, selfish "bad traits" notwithstanding, a natural human grown-up also possesses some "good traits" such as love, kindness and care for others. You may say these socially good traits are derived and kept because they bring benefits to the group, creating greater chances for survival for a greater number of people, thus it is still the natural law at work, and you are right. "Social Darwinism" means truly a good thing if interpreted this way.

As a matter of fact, I would argue from a strictly evolutionary point of view, that once such "emergent qualities" as cooperation, love and compassion appear, they become "winners" and non-discardable building blocks for evolution, forces that move life in the universe up a higher level.

With such qualities built-in us, maybe that's why we are naturally attracted to the "transcendentals": things that are good, beautiful or true, even when we are not entirely clear what they might be.

Or perhaps that higher level, such as loving enemies or meeting aggression with kindness, has been revealed in our religious ideals and by some "holy-man" examples, that teach and show us how it can be achieved through "the love or fear of God" and spiritual practices.

What a privileged position we humans are at, to be either pushed from below, or pulled from above, to our next high!


"The moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals."
— Charles Darwin

"And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good."
— Genesis 1:31