Food for thought

We live in an age of crisis – all sorts of crisis ranging from political to social to economic to religious to spiritual to something deeply personal and unsettling. The latest crisis is that of climate change. And experts say that the next world war will be fought over water woes. What is missing, and what could have gone a long way to ameliorate the woes around and within, is interconnectedness – the sense of being connected to each and everything around us, not just to humans. In one of the schools of modern psychology, it is called systems thinking, which means everything is thought of as a self-organizing system with a whole lot of interconnections within. Human society is one of the best examples – yes, it is a system in which one is connected to the other in so many ways.

Just take it this simple way, for instance: When you are about to take your food, just think of the many dimensions at work – the grocery shop and the shopkeeper from you bought your stuff, the vendor who sold you vegetables, the farmer who grew that food, the truck driver who picked it up and brought it to the market, the soil that allowed that food to grow, and the manures and fertilizers produced somewhere else and that reached the farmer by some means in which others were involved. So many things! And we are talking of the thought when you are merely about to take your food and think like a systems thinker. This is interconnectedness. The Buddha had thought on those lines about 2,500 years ago, based on kindness and compassion without any motive attached.

When all of us think of the web of interconnectedness we are in and have to live with, but which we do not give attention to or which we are reluctant to admit because of our selfishness and ego, we shall begin to have a new perspective on the ways to solve the varied crises around us – each and every crisis, which does have a solution in one way or the other.

But all of that will require us to let go of our individual egos and to begin to think of the whole world as one interconnected family. Just give a thought to it when you wake up and before retiring to your bed as a matter of practice. Perhaps a better world will be in place in unimaginable ways.