You Are Here?

Sometimes, I am simply staggered by the wealth of human consciousness.  Are you ever amazed by just how complex that pale, wrinkled gray stuff between your ears actually is?  How many memories are tucked away in the folds, ready to be accessed at the taste of a cookie or a line in a song?  How many strange and obscure facts are there in your brain that you never knew you knew until you find you correctly answered that one Jeopardy! question?  How many images are there, be they places, faces, works of art?  How many words in how many languages?  How many emotions have you felt in your life—no, forget that: how many emotions have you felt today?  For me, the list begins with fatigue and continues with relief, satisfaction, amusement, sorrow, exasperation, concern, earnestness…and I’m sure there are some that I’ve missed.  Most importantly, how many ideas rest in that cave of bone, thoughts and dreams coiled around their source?

Think about that for a moment.  Then, allow me to remind you that there are 7.2 billion of those brains in the world.  

No wonder we still have trouble understanding ourselves.  There is so much territory to cover, so much that it would take us longer than our lifetimes last to even scratch the surface.

Of course many of those thoughts and much of that experience is shared.  We all hunger, thirst, and seek to survive.  We all want something from our lives, and we all seek to connect with others who want similar things.  But in the end, these are only the most basic things, and even the person who is most like you in the entire world shares only part of who you are.  Imagine that you and that super-similar person are two circles in a Venn diagram.  At best, I’d say that you share two-thirds of your area, and each of you hold your own boundaries outside of the other.  And some of us never cross one another’s borders at all.  With so much that makes us who we are, so much that changes us in every single day, it’s impossible that there could ever be anyone just like you.

The Internet provides the beginning of a map of that vast world of thought, one that can help you locate those who are like you and those who are most different.  There you can find people’s thoughts and opinions in vlogs, forums, and blogs like mine.  You can hear their songs and see their art, listen to their voices and see their faces.  You can read about the causes to which they have chosen to devote their lives (and so many causes, with all the passion of many hearts behind them!  Breast cancer research, deep ocean exploration, gay rights, robotics, veteran rehabilitation, autism, ants, sports analysis…just scroll through the videos on TED talks).  You can see photos of their lives and hear about their day, eventful or not.  You can see what they want, what they dream about, what they love.  

It's a confusing, fragmented, and imperfect map, representing only a portion of the human race, and yet it's the best representation yet of what humanity really looks like.  In the end, all the Internet really is, in my opinion, is an attempt to make all of this tangible, to reach out for everything we are and say, here we are.  This is it, this is the way it is.  Humorous and profound, beautiful and ugly, fierce and loud and wise and loving, running in seven billion different directions and all seeking the same fulfillment.  This is who we are.

Maybe, if we can find ourselves on the map, we'll realize that there is a world of difference between being unique and being alone.

The beautiful art is from artPause on Etsy.