ambitious or the creative, since they live so much in their own heads
and in their own bubble.
Finding the universal in the personal, and the personal in the
universal, is not only the secret to art and leadership and even
entrepreneurship, it is the secret to centering oneself. It both turns
down the volume of noise in the world and tunes one in to the quiet
wavelength of wisdom that sages and philosophers have long been
on.
This connectedness and universality does not need to stop at our
fellow man. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum recently pointed out
the narcissism of the human obsession with what it means to be
human. A better, more open, more vulnerable, more connected
question is to ask what it means to be alive, or to exist, period. As she
wrote:
We share a planet with billions of other sentient beings,
and they all have their own complex ways of being
whatever they are. All of our fellow animal creatures, as
Aristotle observed long ago, try to stay alive and reproduce
more of their kind. All of them perceive. All of them desire.
And most move from place to place to get what they want
and need.We share much of our DNA with these creatures, we breathe the
same air, we walk on the same land and swim in the same oceans.
We are inextricably intertwined with each other—as are our fates.
The less we are convinced of our exceptionalism, the greater
ability we have to understand and contribute to our environment, the
less blindly driven we are by our own needs, the more clearly we can
appreciate the needs of those around us, the more we can appreciate
the larger ecosystem of which we are a part.
Peace is when we realize that victory and defeat are almost
identical spots on one long spectrum. Peace is what allows us to take
joy in the success of others and to let them take joy in our own. Peace
is what motivates a person to be good, to treat every other living