Sunday Meditation 1/20/08
I am unusually tired today, so the Meditation will be unusually short and simple today--but I think it is for a good reason.
Over this weekend, a joint effort between Albertson's/Sav-on and a number of volunteer UCSD pharmacy students allowed for a health-screening booth at the Asian American Expo in Pomona, CA.
I was there. The number of people there was amazing; I was in a sea of people who mostly spoke languages of which I knew virtually no words.
Yet even in this, there was communication. A small polite bow, a kind smile--these things needed no words, no qualifications--just well-wishing from one person to another.
These people seemed at first so different from me, but now I feel, in some odd way (like many things I feel), as though I am their distant kin--perhaps not-well-connected, and we don't talk much, but related all the same.
The point is this: We are all human, each one of us, and none any more so in being than any other. Even if ethnicities differ, we are all one race: human.
So why, then, do we usually treat each other like others aren't?
Over this weekend, a joint effort between Albertson's/Sav-on and a number of volunteer UCSD pharmacy students allowed for a health-screening booth at the Asian American Expo in Pomona, CA.
I was there. The number of people there was amazing; I was in a sea of people who mostly spoke languages of which I knew virtually no words.
Yet even in this, there was communication. A small polite bow, a kind smile--these things needed no words, no qualifications--just well-wishing from one person to another.
These people seemed at first so different from me, but now I feel, in some odd way (like many things I feel), as though I am their distant kin--perhaps not-well-connected, and we don't talk much, but related all the same.
The point is this: We are all human, each one of us, and none any more so in being than any other. Even if ethnicities differ, we are all one race: human.
So why, then, do we usually treat each other like others aren't?