Hey Everybody welcome back to The Club compass podcast. This is Laurie your host. I'm talking about social issues, behavior change, and empowerment based strategies that provide sustainable outcomes. Today I'm going to read some excerpts of a book from somebody that I appreciate. This book was really helpful to me. And her name is Valerie Kaur. She wrote a book called See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto Of Revolutionary Love. She has a history with the social change. And I want to just read you an excerpt because because it's so juicy.
Okay, so here we go.
Wonder is our birth rate. It comes easily in childhood, the feeling of watching dust motes, dancing in sunlight, or climbing a tree to touch the sky or falling asleep thinking about where the universe ends. If we are safe and nurtured enough to develop our capacity to wonder, we start to wonder about the other people in our lives to their thoughts and experiences, their pain and their joy their wants and needs, we begin to sense that they are to themselves as vast and complex as we are to ourselves, their inner world as infinite as ours. In other words, we are seeing them as our equal. We are gaining information about how to love them. Wonder is the wellspring for love. It's easy to wonder about the internal life of the people closest to us. But it's harder to wonder about people who seem like strangers or outsiders. When we choose to wonder about people we don't know, when we imagine their lives and listen to their story, we begin to expand the circle of those we see as part of us. We prepare ourselves to love beyond what evolution requires. The culture loves beyond our own flesh and blood is ancient. And that goes down to us on the lips of indigenous leaders, spiritual teachers and social reformers through the centuries, Nanat called us to see no stranger, Buddha, to practicing unending compassion, Abraham to open our tents all he says, to love our neighbor, Mohammed to take in the orphan nearby to live without limits. They all expanded the circle who counts as one of us, and therefore who is worthy of our care and concern. These teachings were rooted in the linguistic, cultural and spiritual context of their time, that they spoke of a common vision of our interconnectedness and interdependence. It is the ancient Sanskrit truth that we can look upon anyone or anything and say, xxxxxxx. I am that is the African philosophy, philosophy Ubuntu. I am because you are. It is the Mayan precept in xxxxx, you are my other ME. What has been an ancient spiritual truth is now increasingly verified by science. We are all individually part of one another. We share common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on Earth. The air we breathe contains atoms that have passed through the lungs of the ancestors long dead. Our bodies are composed of the same elements created deep inside the furnaces of long dead stars. We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say, as a moral declaration in the spiritual, cosmological and biological fact, you are a part of me I do not know yet. But you don't have to be religious in order to wonder. You only have to reclaim a sliver of once what you once knew as a child. If you remember how to wonder, can you already have what you need to learn how to love. Wonder is where love begins. But the failure to wonder is the beginning of violence. Once people stop wondering about others, once they no longer see others as a part of them. it disables their interest for empathy. And once they lose empathy, they can do anything to them, or allow anything to be done to them. It's higher institutions built to preserve the interests of one group of people over another depend on this failure of imagination. Violence comes in the form of policies on the seat and sometimes bloodshed in the streets. More often, it comes in the form that are hard to see, unless we find a way to make them visible through our stories. As a child, I learned how to wonder.
