Recently I have noticed, as I walk around Manhattan’s crowded streets, that I have been trying out an alternate way of looking at the people around me. Rather than seeing each person simply as a individual human being, I’m finding myself focusing more on the space between those individuals — the conversational space.
Two people together, whether they are walking or talking or just hanging out, create a unique energy in the Universe that other humans are very good at perceiving. It’s as though there is another living being floating between them, invisible to the eye but quite visible to the soul.
This is all perfectly consistent with our shared evolutionary heritage. Our one and only true superpower is our extraordinary ability to communicate with each other. This superpower is so much an innate part of us that we simply take it for granted.
Yet nearly all human activity centers around this collective superpower. We define ourselves largely by how others perceive us, and make sense of the world around us through an implicit prism of shared understanding.
In the realm of the human, to be an “individual” is to be in relationship to the whole of humanity. For of what use is our individuality, unless we can share it with each other?