Today, I got to thinking about the term “Soul Mate.”

I was walking through the aisles of a local grocery store, and I heard a girl talking to her friend on the phone. She seemed excited about someone that she had just met, and she was telling her friend that she was sure that this person was her soul mate.

I thought about how often those words are used in trivial moments—and how often they’re used in timeless moments.  Then I thought about how often it was used in nonsensical or unseemly moments. And then I started to think about what these words truly mean.

Of course, universally,  we have a basic, general understanding of what those words mean—a soul mate is a person that completes us, in a sense.

A soul mate is a person who sees the beauty in us that other’s do not. They tend to enrich our lives, because once we find them, we feel like we aren’t so alone in such a vast space anymore.

We see them as the true seers of our souls. The people that see the light within us, that we ourselves are dim to. They are the people who cause us to shine more fully.

But, in reality—we are all soul mates.

Why isn’t that taught more? Why didn’t anyone tell us that as a child? Why didn’t our school teachers help us to come to that conclusion much earlier on?

As I stood there in the aisle, I just kind of grew still. My eyes started to wander around the store. I started to see people interacting, but even more so, I noticed a lack of interaction.

I thought to myself,“Why do people look down at their feet, when a stranger comes within eyesight.”

Why don’t people look into each others’ eyes more? Why do we fear casual connections with strangers? Why do we fear striking up conversations as we wait in lines?

We are all the same. Our DNA patterns may have caused  aesthetic differences in our physical make up, but at our core, we are all the same. We are living our lives, day by day, alongside one another. We are breathing the same air and feeling the same emotions. We are falling in and out of love, as we move through time and space. We are each grasping for direction our own small life.

Everything that we see in the eyes of our lovers, should be what we see in each and every person we meet.

We should notice the softness of their smiles, the beauty in the freckles of their eyes and the way they laugh at things that humor them. We should treat every single person we meet, with the same loving gratitude and appreciation that we do for the most beautiful lovers of our lives.

No person in this world, is any less important than another.

Life is life. Breath is breath.

This is the most beautiful part of humanity—the universality of it.

I stood there in the store today in awe. I felt as if I had just discovered gold. My eyes grew heavy, but my heart felt light. And I thought to myself how beautiful the world could truly be, if we just opened our eyes and our hearts a bit more.

What would the world be like, if we treated each and every person we met as though they were our one true soul mate?

What if we listened to each person fully and intently? What if we trusted them with our deepest secrets?

Imagine what it would be like, if we showed them appreciation for the beauty of their existence. If we hid nothing. If we feared less and loved more. Imagine if we let down are guard and put down our phones.

What if we stared into each other’s eyes more? Or if we truly cared to understand other people’s stories, instead of just repeating our own?

How different would our world be?

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Relephant:

Deconstructing the Soul Mate Myth.

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Author: Echo Giesel WIdmer

Editor: Yoli Ramazzina

Photo: Flickr/Kelly Keeton