When it hurts to move and you forget how to laugh.

When avoiding mirrors becomes your exercise routine. Remember that in those moments when you feel small and insignificant that your life is not just your own but a part of a human collective, designed to serve each other.

It is that oneness, that connective-ness, that helps pave the path for our individual happiness. The people that have stuck by me during the darkest periods of solitude confirm my faith that we are never in this game called life alone.

 

1. There are no random acts…We are all connected…You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind…” ~ Mitch Albom

2.  “Your neighbor is your other self dwelling behind a wall. In understanding, all walls shall fall down.” ~ Kahlil Gibran

3. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts” ~ William Shakespeare.

4. “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” ~ Charles Darwin

5. Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.” ~ Albert Einstein

6. “What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

7. “The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.” ~ Tony Kushner

8. “Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator. The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man.”―Aberjhani

 

Sonder: n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

 

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Editorial Assistant: Todd Otten/Editor: Bryonie Wise

Photo: elephant archives