Take a moment to ask yourself: when was the last time you thought about the air you breathe? If you are like most of us, it likely has been quite a while. Yet how we think about the air we breathe is not unique. This is how we think about many of the essential contributions we receive.
What are the implications?
How we are living takes for granted what allows us to live in the first place.
By taking as a given, all the abundance we receive which empowers us to do what we do, we are able to live in ways that diminish these essential contributions.
How did we get here?
We have participated in the creation of a culturally based belief system that has detached us from how we exist each day. This belief system is nourished by the prevailing virtues, values and narratives we are told that frame how we understand ourselves, each other, and the world we live in.
Freedom, independence, self-interest, competition, nationalism, sectarianism, and exploitative economics, to name a few, have encouraged us to see ourselves as separate beings who can only earn our claim on the natural resources that sustain all of us by competing against each other.
This is a self-defeating lie that has produced a society where harming the hands that serve us is normal, and our ultimate virtue is gluttony.
One fact that has been obscured by the prevailing narratives is scarcity of the goods and services needed to support a healthy life has been made obsolete by human innovation. The only reason we experience scarcity is because our society endorses a virtue that we can earn and claim more than we can use, even though most humans on the Earth do not have enough resources to fully contribute.
In America, the housing affordability crisis that denies the average middle class family the ability to buy a home in the average American city, is not due to a shortage of houses in America. Currently, there are approximately 120 million single family homes in America and only about 108 million are fully occupied. The same trend exists with access to food, education, healthcare, skill development, leisure, and all the essential goods and services we need to live a full, contributing life.
Yet there is an obvious solution to this debilitating problem.
We practice it every day when we enjoy a home cooked meal with our family.
Everyone gathers around the table. The food is placed on the table. Each person takes the food they are going to eat, passing the platters of food on to the next person at the table. If we are still hungry, we take more food. All of us leave the table full and we usually have leftovers to put away for later.
The solution is we share.
Why?
Because all the people around the table matter to us.
In the culturally induced blind spot created by all the contributions we receive that we take for granted, are the boundless number of people, creatures and the natural environment we rely on to exist each day.
Remembering how we exist provides the factual reason why all of us matter.
Remembering reveals the undeniable truth of who we are…individual beings in symbiotic relationship with each other and the natural environment that sustains us.
Nothing in nature lives independently.
Remember.