NO ONE IS AN ISLAND

No Thought Is An Island

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. John Donne

No thought is an island; it’s an ocean of ideas. Louis Flood   

The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.                             Ralph W Sockman 

 The three island metaphors might help us to better understand the interconnectedness of all things. Although interconnectedness may actually be too complex for the human mind to fully comprehend. An island is considered to be something that is isolated. These island metaphors suggest that people, thinking, and knowledge are not isolated or separate. They are all interconnected, just like everything else.

Because metaphor is so big on my list of useful concepts, and because disunity, division, disagreement, separation, tribalism and lack of unison is so prevalent today in America, the island quotations motivated me to write another blog on the unifying idea of interconnectedness.

People are interconnected to other people. Thinking is interconnected to beliefs, attitudes, emotions and other thoughts. Knowledge is interconnected to other knowledge, to illusions and to the unknown. If everything is interconnected to everything in an unbroken wholeness, then there are actually no islands, metaphorically.

I am hoping that this blog will influence others to join me in admitting we don’t really understand the interconnectedness of everything to everything else. However, I believe we need to keep trying to better understand and to increase our sense of wonder.

My strategy is to be in awe of interconnectedness. At times I do think about the relationship between the planet earth and the universe. I have no problem admitting I don’t understand and that I marvel in awe, wonder, respect, inspiration, admiration.

If we could admit that nothing is an island, nothing is separate, everything is connected, then we would not be divisive, we would not separate or exclude anything from anything else. Everything would be “part of the main”. Can you imagine what the modern day American culture would look like?

No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive. Mahatma Gandhi