You have met yourself in someone else
“You are every human being that has ever lived or who will ever live. ”
-Andy Weir
Photo by Akiomi Kuroda
Imagine if every time you were kind to someone, you were being kind to yourself, every time you were hurting someone, you were hurting yourself, every time you hit someone, you were hitting yourself, every time you cared for someone, you were caring for yourself.
How would you treat other people if so?
What I took from Weir’s ‘The egg’ was that every emotion we feel, be it happiness, content, sadness, has already been felt by someone else and will always be felt by someone else.
It sort of makes you feel less special but in a good way; you are literally not alone in your feelings. Studies say that about 100 billion people have ever lived on earth, so about 100 billion people have felt that joy, love, success, failure, loneliness, anger, and pain that you have felt or are yet to feel.
That’s just even more proof that every single human being on earth is connected to every other human.
But…
we are all different and all the same.
If we really are all different incarnations of ourselves as Weir says, we have to acknowledge that our different selves have or will experience the same emotions, but will not have the exact same experiences. This is why we judge people. We don’t understand why some feel too much and others too little, because we do not feel as intensely or as mildly as they do. It’s why the word “overreacting” exists, and others like “heartless”.
Truth is we will not feel joy, love, success, failure, loneliness, anger, and pain the way others do. It’s why some people say they can’t find the words to explain how they feel when they’re overjoyed or extremely sad after something happens to them. Hence, all different experiences but all the same emotions. Bet you feel special again..
I’ve always said that we’re equals because our insides are the same, blood red, about 270 bones at birth, 206 by adulthood. Ironically, many humans want division when we’re in unison within, we’re all stuck in this one egg, the universe.
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