3/8/2020 Our "one wild and precious life"
Just a quick message this week, a reminder of the power within the actions we take every day to benefit our communities, sharing some words of others.
First up is Nicholas Christakis, Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, director of the Human Nature Lab and co-director of the Institute for Network Science, from his On Being interview. His research is on how humans evolved socially positive behaviors and attitudes, such as love, friendship, and altruism, as a way to ensure we can continue to live in groups.
"...people who take volitional acts of their own will to improve the state of affairs around them can actually have much larger and more dramatic impacts than they had appreciated. And I think that people making choices about how to live their lives and live with others is crucially important and that we have that responsibility to work with the better angels of our nature."
"I’ll just give you one very quick example. Human beings have very few, if any, natural predators. The leading killer of human beings is other human beings. ... we’ve had to evolve to cope with this threat to our survival, which is each other. And so...[w]e’ve evolved these capacities that make us capable of a convivial existence, by and large. I’m not saying we don’t kill each other. We do....I think that we can gain better insights into our common humanity, our shared humanity, by taking more seriously and focusing more attention on these wonderful qualities, these wonderful capacities that we have evolved..."
Second, a beautiful line from a poem he quoted, "The Summer Day," by Mary Oliver:
http://www.phys.unm.edu/~tw/fas/yits/archive/oliver_thesummerday.html
Sendi,
Liz