Flourishing Together #015

Hello, and welcome again to Every Dawn where every workday, I try to leave you with a thought for the day. Today, I was thinking, because in the past, we talked a little bit about nature, about being wild, about how we depend on nature. So, I was thinking along these lines, and it occurred to me that the whole world can only exist because things work together, and this is something that we often tend to forget.

We see ourselves as alone and autonomous. We also have this image, you know, I was mentioning the cowboy the other day, the cowboy who is alone and self-reliant and self-sustaining. Or today, perhaps the prepper who is alone and self-sustaining and self-reliant. But in reality, none of us is self-sustaining. The prepper may not depend on other human beings, but he certainly depends on nature to grow his food, to grow, you know, the lettuce in the ground, for the tree to grow and give fruit, for the chickens to multiply and lay eggs. And these things, in turn, depend on the climate, depend on oxygen produced by the plants, depend on sunlight that will bring energy onto the Earth so that all these processes of life can continue.

And this is something that already Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, saw, and he said that everything depends on everything else for its flourishing. He used this word "flourishing," like a plant that is happy and produces flowers and leaves. And this flourishing only works for everything if every other thing flourishes on which this thing depends. So, for example, you know what I'm doing right now? I'm recording this video, but this could not be a good video if the camera I'm using is not good. So my video depends on the flourishing, the quality of this camera. This camera, in turn, can only be good if the company that makes it is good, is flourishing, has good engineers. These engineers can only be good if, in their studies, they learned how to engineer this camera correctly. So if the university they were studying at was flourishing as a university and gave them all this knowledge they needed.

Also, of course, it depends on electricity. It can only work if I can charge it. So, I need batteries; I need electricity in my home. All these things need to flourish. Then, in order for this video to reach you, we need YouTube to flourish. We need all this infrastructure that YouTube uses to flourish. We need hard disks, we need computers, we need the internet, and this depends on the work of thousands and thousands, perhaps millions, of people who all have to come together around this goal of making it possible for me to send this video file to you. And without the work of all these thousands of millions of people, this video would not exist, and nothing else would exist of all these things that we use every day.

You know, I have my coffee cup here every morning, and this coffee is coming, I don't know where it's coming from, probably from some place where they grow coffee. And it has to be planted by a farmer there who, poor guy, probably is exploited, although I try to get the fair trade coffees. And then this coffee has to be transported to my place; it has to be shipped. You need global shipping; you need people who know how to use a ship, how to direct it, how to make it move safely to bring this coffee here. And then I put it into a machine to grind it. I need somebody to construct this machine. I need the electricity to grind it. I need a coffee machine where I can put my espresso powder, and the coffee comes out. And I need another machine to produce steam so that I can steam the milk for it. And the list goes on and on, right? It never ends. For everything we do, we need somebody else to do what we need as a basis of the thing that we are then adding as a value from our own ability.

And so, the flourishing of one thing depends on the flourishing of everything else. You know, a bird cannot be flourishing if it doesn't have a good tree to sit on. The tree cannot flourish if the ground where it grows does not have the bacteria and the fungi and the soil and all the things in the soil that are needed for the tree to grow. And the soil cannot have all these things without the insect life that will provide these things and this weather that will provide the sunlight and the rain.

And so, in the end, we are all dependent on this huge cycle of nature but also of human activity that will enable us to have our lives. And so today, perhaps when you go out, you might want to think of it, or you might want to look around and realize how much each one of us depends on what other people are doing for us. And that we can all only flourish together or not at all. And this includes nature; this includes trees and insects because we often very, very quickly, you know, kill an insect because it annoys us, or we are afraid of it, or it stings us. But we have to be aware that without these insects, we would have no food. There would be no food without insects; there would be no agriculture without insects. We would die without insects. And this applies to many other things that are necessary, but we don't see them because we have this vision of this greatness of our human existence that is independent, you know, like the cowboy, like the hermit. But it's not true; we are not like that. We are all in this together, and we can only survive together.

So, thank you, and see you tomorrow. Bye-bye.