….we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves….but the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom.
William James
The more we understand about the nature of reality the clearer it becomes that an atomistic, reductionist viewpoint is an illusion.
Of course we can distinguish one individual from another….one island from another, one tree from another, one person from another…but no island, tree or person exists in isolation.
There’s a Hugh Grant film which lots of people watch at this time of year, “Love Actually”, but perhaps my favourite Hugh Grant film is “About a Boy”, which starts with his character delivering a soliloquy, responding to a question on a tv quiz show about “who said No Man is an Island”. He answers correctly. It was John Donne. But he dismisses the phrase as rubbish, claiming he, himself, is not just an island, but in fact he’s like Ibiza! It’s a very funny movie with some intensely moving scenes and it delivers a clear message – “No man is an island”.
A lot of the problems in the world stem from a failure to understand that everything and everyone is connected. Our lives are intimately very entangled. The individual threads of our lives weave together ever more complex, creative and beautiful tapestries of shared existence.
Hyper individualism, egoism and narcissism are the scourges of the world, and I lose nothing of my uniqueness, or my agency, by embracing my connectedness. In fact, how can I be fully me without seeing myself as an inseparable part of the whole?
Heroes Not Zombies 
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