We are that

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb's quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of circus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chertz and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

-David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

About a week ago, I was running on a treadmill, minding my own business. I try to run at least 35 minutes per session, for about 4 miles, twice a week. (I'm training for a half-marathon, and then for a marathon). Listening to pop music, I felt that familiar feeling of relaxation once you hit that runner's groove. Maybe it's a slight rush of adrenaline, but the mere sound of your steps feels rhythmic like the pitter-patter of a steady heartbeat. I felt energetic--I felt good.

It was then I felt I almost left the situation. I felt I had morphed into a third-person observer, observing myself running on the treadmill. Of course, I was still in my body--it wasn't as if I had suddenly transmogrified into a soul--I was present, but in a different way. It was then I realized something: we were all running, struggling, exerting. The people beside me, burning calories. The men and women on the ellipticals in front of me. The man on the chest press machine. The woman on the oddly-suggestive hips-open-wide machine.

I felt a tremendous sense of community...after all, we were all at the gym. But even more so what I experienced boiled down to this: we were all of us brothers and sisters. That last line of the first paragraph of The Pale King just sort of rang in my head, as I continued to run. I mean to say that we are all connected--that stranger in the coffee shop is a brother, someone you may not know but someone who shares 99% of your genes. Someone who belongs to this community of life called humanity.

What does David Foster Wallace mean by that? We are all of us, nature included, related. The land he mentions, encompassing the plants and flowers and weeds and insects, is as much a part of us as we are a part of it. They nod in unison, minding their own business, which is collective in nature. For me, this is a great reminder to be more patient with people. It's motivation to experience the world through multiple sets of eyes. To have empathy where it might be too easy to be cruel or mean. To have patience in a world that is determined to spin faster than humanly possible.

It really reminds of Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica" where the speaker notes, "A poem should be wordless / As the flight of birds." At the end of the poem, she states, "A poem should not mean / But be." I'm moved by that kind of soft frailty to experience life as it comes to me and not to have, necessarily, the experience of my life. 

Look at it a different way. Stand, before the horizon, and see your brothers and sisters in agreement, where the grain of the field meets the dirt, where the sky envelops the mountains, and where the air surrounds your being. This is you, and you are this. Gone is self-identity and what is left is a celebration of the new.