FBOW: We are all Interrelated

In the past three posts I related very briefly scientific research that promotes being more relaxed and calm and the positive effect it has on people's health and lives.  The importance of taking heed of this very new research on advice that is very old is that it is central to our happiness and the effect that we have on the world.  Something that I think is very true is that we are constantly creating the world that we live in.  Our actions and even our thoughts, which affect our feelings and perceptions, are constantly reinforcing or challenging the ways of the world.

I am always inspired by the first chapter of the Dhammapada which is appropriately entitled: Choices. It reads: We are what we think, all that we are arises with our thoughts.  With our thoughts we make the world.  Speak or act with an impure mind and trouble will follow you as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.  ...Speak or act with a pure mind and happiness will follow you as your shadow, unshakable.  

It is important to improve upon our own happiness first as a way to help others.  We live in a society that is not driven by humanistic values, but instead it is driven by values regarding productivity, consumption and monetary value.  These values encourage us to sacrifice our lives for material success and recognition of our accomplishment and station.  To challenge this assumption of our worth and look to what is fulfilling to us uniquely and personally is a monumental challenge.  What good is material success if we lose our body to ill health and our mind is constantly racked by stress?  We need to promote and find happiness for ourselves for our own good.  Then our lives will be worth something more than being one more cog in the macro economic machine.  

Human beings are intensely peer susceptible animals and as such what we choose to do with our life affects those around you.  If you choose to manage stress better, make more healthy choices or be more compassionate that will likely improve your personal relationships in your family or among your social circle.  This will have an impact on other people, even if we never know the extent to which we affected others. 

I once worked with a guy in college at a video store who was intensely hyper with a very short attention span and very fast mouth.  Working with him was always a bit of a chore and I thought that he must have thought I was boring because I wouldn't always entertain all of the random tangents he would talk about.  One day to my surprise he told me that he really enjoyed working with me because he was really calm and relaxed when I was around.  I was shocked because I didn't get that impression from him, but also because that was what he called relaxed.  Yikes.  

Too often we have big desires to change the world but we neglect to examine ourselves first.  We have the most power to affect change in ourselves and through those action (and thoughts) we do change the world.  Maybe not in the dramatic way we are used to seeing in movies, but maybe not being dramatic and flashy the change is deeper and actually more profound and lasting.   

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said it well when he said that, "...all life is interrelated.  We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny...strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.  You can never what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way the world is made.  I didn't make it this way, but this is the interrelated structure of reality."

(By the way...FBOW stands for For Better Or Worse.)