Towards a connected mindset

On a memorable late Thursday afternoon about 18 months ago, I was sitting around a table with a group of wonderful people sharing food and drinks as we pondered a tricky question: “In what way are you part of the problems in the world?”.

As the conversations bounced around and things got increasingly personal, as they do in these Table discussions, my friend Annie made one of those contributions that invokes involuntary expressions of affirmation. She said something like, “I think most, if not all that’s wrong with the world, can be traced back to the fact that we think we can live as if we are disconnected from each other and the planet.”

I’ve thought a lot about that since. I think she was right. And if she was, that most of our social problems can be traced back to the belief or mindset that we can live as if we are independent, then it follows that we need to reboot our worldview and install a new mindset that understands the connectedness of life, that, as our popular anthem says, ‘we are one, but we are many’.

Evidence of the ‘independent’ mindset is ubiquitous. We hear people of privilege talk as if they are self made or deserve their privilege, with no acknowledgement of the opportunity or inherited headstart they got. Economists recognise how failing to consider the true costs of production (environmental trauma, transport costs, exploitative labour etc etc) have skewed the benefits of the economy to apex consumers - people like us. We think that our emotional or physical violence, whether in a friendship feud or a state sponsored war, is one way, and doesn’t impoverish our own souls. The basic unit in western society is the individual. Groups are considered to be simply collections of individuals.

OK. So what is the alternative?

To conceive of a (for me) fresh mindset, I need to zoom out. Imagine those time lapse films of city intersections where individual humans are invisible in the predictability of movement of the masses. Or think about how, within nations we conform nicely into a stereotypical segment of the population, and how (despite our delusion to the contrary) our consumer choices are predictable in a market segment. We might be concerned about our individual privacy, but the fact is, at scale, our movement is predetermined by the patterns of living we chose, along with the masses of others with whom we are followers. What if, instead of thinking about ourselves as ‘alive’ we understood that we are a particular expression of Life?

I wonder how my attitudes and behaviours would be affected if my ‘mental operating system’ didn’t think of myself as an independent entity? I wonder how my choices, big and small, would look if I saw myself as part of a bigger whole, with connections in all directions, rather than ‘other’.

It’s easy to think I’m a wave. I see the shape and impact of my being as I move through life. But a wave is simply water that has been energised by forces beyond it. It is intensely malleable as it shapeshifts depending on those forces. So am I. I am shaped by the environment in which I live, by the culture, geography and circumstances of my little piece of ‘ocean’. I think I’m in control of my destiny; I can be whoever I want, working hard means success etc etc. But all these mindsets ignore the platform, the starting point and the cultivating context.

So a wave is not seperate from the ocean. It is seawater enlivened by energy. So am I a living being, or am I a being enlivened by the energy of Life?

Why does this matter? Because, if, a hypothesised, (almost?) everything that is wrong with the world can be tracked back to the belief that we can live as if we are disconnected, then we’ve got to figure out a way to think very differently, and unless we do a radical reboot with a new operating system, I fear, at least for me, I’ll be playing token ‘unity’ and my efforts at connectedness will be poor approximations.