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| Adapted from http://blogs.cofc.edu/whitman/2010/11/10/yusef-komunyakaas-the-towers-in-light-of-juliana-spahr/ |
I think that one of main themes that my blog displays is connectedness. The idea of following an arc of concepts as opposed to looking at a single idea has allowed me to move from one topic to another while, hopefully, displaying some of the connections that exist between them.
Connectedness is something that has cropped up a couple of times in my university life this semester. First was during a friends’ presentation about global warming in which she stressed the importance of the idea of everything being connected. Not a ground breaking concept and yet she was in the only group who blatantly pointed it out and emphasised its significance.
The other point in which the concept of connectedness cropped up is in my general education paper about Global History. Now of course it is easy to look back at history and see lots of points of connection but what has been hit home to me as a result of this paper is that so many important/life changing historical moments were never guaranteed to occur. They took place as a result of chance and a multitude of factors that took place before them. The Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain because of developments in regard to agriculture that took place in the Netherlands, the huge population of London and the even bigger export market of colonised North America. These were all individual/unplanned factors and yet they resulted in a huge leap forward for the human population.
So what to take from this? Without getting to philosophical I think that it is important to remember in life that our decisions and decisions made by other people are connected. There is no escaping that the multitude of things that humans do to negatively impact the environment are all connected and catching up with us. And on a more local level, the individual decisions we make, while they may feel insignificant, are part of something bigger.
The different concepts of sustainability and the idea of the four well-beings that form the cornerstones of the Local Government Act for New Zealand, both recognise connectedness. The whole notion of sustainable development requires one to take into account economic, environmental and social implications. The idea of connectedness is everywhere in our lives, it is important that we recognise it.
With that I will leave you with a quote by the Dalai Lama:
“If we look at the situation from various angles, such as complexity and inter-connectedness of the nature of modern existence, then we will gradually notice a change in our outlook, so that when we say ‘others’ and when we think of others, we will no longer dismiss them as something that is irrelevant to us. We will no longer feel indifferent”
