Mirroring symbiosis...

To be clear about my posting from last night, I don't feel that we as humans are truly helpless. We may not be able to control a lot of things about life, but there are things we can do. Therefore, the greatest way to alleviate our overwhelming fear, as individuals and as a nation, is to turn our helpless feelings around and instead become helpful. If we focus our energies on helping each other, maybe we wouldn't be as afraid. And, maybe this is why other countries don't suffer from paranoia the way ours does. This actually goes along with the Canadian ideal of the "we're all in it together" mindset. We are all Americans; we are all humans; we are all in need of the same thing- each other.

But how do we do this? Stop locking our doors? Go up to complete strangers and ask if we can help them? No. I think it's more about an open willingness to help than actively looking for ways to help. A lot of people volunteer at soup kitchens or homeless shelters for the wrong reasons. It doesn't aid your conscience when you are just doing something so that you will be able to say you did it, or so that you feel like a better person. The purpose behind true helping, I think, is to help the other person feel better. But if we have a mindset open to helping, and an opportunity comes up for us to help, we will be better able to recognize it and take action. If we continue with this individualistic focus, we will miss our chances to help other people, thereby continuing the vicious cycle of helplessness and fear.


Again, we can look to nature as our teacher. The flower helps the bee by providing it with honey; the bee help the flower by pollinating it. These symbiotic relationships are what make the natural world work. If only humans would mirror them.