Interbeing awareness is the key to joy

Let me share with you a personal story of how I experience interbeing/interconnection and interdependence daily and how it helps me to have a joyful life.

In 2010, I had knee surgery for a torn meniscus. About six people were directly involved in my surgery; but about six billion were indirectly involved to make it all happen. What do I mean by that?

Early that morning, I took a shower in the water that is supplied by the City of Coral Springs. I was thinking of the thousands of people who were involved in the harnessing, purification, and channeling of that water to my house and the people who manufactured the pipes, the stores that sold them, the plumbers who installed them properly so that the water can flow safely. The companies that made the water purification chemicals. The people who made the hot water tank and the technicians who installed it. The workers in the factory that made the shower head. The people at Home Depot who sold it to me. When I think like that, the number of people involved in giving me a hot shower that morning, multiplies by thousands.

Remember, the day has barely started, and millions are still going to be involved.

I was wearing a shirt that morning which was made in Bangladesh. The label said: Made in Bangladesh 100% cotton.

Usually, we snatch a shirt from the closet, mostly in a hurry, without paying attention to these things, because our minds are elsewhere. Paying attention to the present moment by practicing mindfulness has given me huge dividends in peace and joy.

Noticing Bangladesh on my shirt label, gives me an opportunity to extend my compassion to a very poor country of 160 million souls on the other side of the planet.

I think of the thousands of people who were involved in the making of that shirt, starting with the poor villagers who produced the cotton, a grandmother who might have woven that cotton into threads in a small factory in a remote village. Her emotions of fear, hope or hopelessness have been woven into the threads that made that shirt which is now covering my body. I think of the people who made the machine that stitched my shirt together; the person who folded it, packed it, sealed it, and placed it on a truck going to the nearest railway station.

The fears, cares, and energy of all those people are part of the fabric I am wearing that day.

Then I think of the train that transported that shirt to the nearest airport in Bangladesh and off to a cargo plane bound for Arkansas, the headquarters of Walmart.

And from there, it is unloaded, coded, and re-routed into a truck that goes about 1000 miles to a Walmart in Coral Springs, Florida. Think of the thousands of employees whose joint effort made that shirt appear on a rack and I pick it up, pay for it with a credit card, issued by a bank that has another ten thousand employees, who make sure that Walmart is paid on my behalf. You see the endless connections with people that make it all possible.

So, about half a million people living halfway around the world have helped me put a shirt on me that day!

That is just the shirt. The pants I am wearing has a story of its own. And the Fruit of the Loom underwear has its own long story too!

The day has barely begun, and I have not gotten to the Surgery Center yet. Judy drives me there in a car that has 2200 different parts. Those 2200 parts of the car have been touched by the energy, imagination, and efforts of another million people, not in the United States, but somewhere in Japan.

Then I walk into the Surgery Center, and a woman at the front desk registers me on a Dell Computer with about 5000 parts, made in China, and now another billion Chinese people are getting involved in my life that day.

Then I am taken into the prep room, and I am surrounded by half a dozen people, including nurses, the anesthesiologist, my doctor, and recovery room personnel. I am thinking of all the people who are connected to those people by extension, their families, friends, the communities they belong to.

The anesthesiologist gives me sedation medication that was manufactured in a medical lab in Nebraska, shipped via FedEx planes and a FedEx driver brings it to the facility. An unknown FedEx driver and all the people in his life have now gotten involved in my life.

And then there is this million-dollar medical equipment with a zillion parts, lights, camera, and laser beams that will make three holes on my knee, will probe the damaged area, and this doctor whom I have seen only twice in my entire life will scrape it, repair it, and make it alright.

That morning, I was held tenderly and directly in the hands of six human beings, but I was indirectly supported and lovingly sustained by the energy of six billion people.

And the funny thing is that I was completely unconscious, totally at the mercy of a group of strangers; maybe not. They are strangers only in a superficial sense. In a deeper sense, they are my spiritual siblings, sharing the home planet.

And it doesn’t matter that one of them was gay, another trans-gendered or another was Black or Hispanic. All that is irrelevant. They are all children of God and mini-gods — channeling healing energy from the Ultimate Healing Source.

This is just one scenario of a single human interaction. This happens in our lives, every day. You don’t have to go into surgery to experience it. Wherever there is a human interaction or transaction, this scenario of interconnection/interbeing and interdependence plays out all the time.

(from Cosmic Kindergarten: Earthly Lessons for a Heavenly Life)