Imagine

I had a dream the other night that I felt compelled to share. It was a very impactful dream. I was walking and I came to a crowd of people. I cannot tell you where this was or who these people were, just that it was a large and diverse crowd of people. I started to sing John Lennon’s “Imagine”. Sort of like one of those flash mobs, people started joining in with me. Pretty soon, we were all holding hands and singing together.

When I woke from the dream, I felt both a sense of love and peace, but I also felt a sense of deep sadness. The sadness came from the fact that our country, our world, is very far from that dream of unity and the “brotherhood of man” that Lennon sang about. It seems we are all so divided, perhaps as much or more than any other time in history. We are divided by race, religion, gender, political affiliation, and I find myself wondering why. I find myself asking why it seems that hate and anger are eclipsing love and friendship. Is not love supposed to triumph over hate? Is not good supposed to triumph over evil? What are we to do about this?

I have written about the importance of loving one another before, but it is a subject worthy of repeating. I will not pretend that I have the solution to world peace. I will not pretend that I am always a ray of sunshine, every moment of every day, but I will say this. We all have a responsibility to do our part to make sure love wins over hate, that friendship wins over anger, and  that understanding and empathy win over discord and division. We must rise above our human differences to find a place of common ground on which we can build a “brotherhood of man.”

I would venture to guess that underneath all of the opinions, political debates, prejudices, and misunderstandings are myriad commonalities. I learned a long time ago that even though people may have different experiences, emotions are universal. When I was in graduate school, I did an internship in a drug and alcohol day treatment program. I was having the most difficult time getting the clients to trust me and open up to me, because I had never been an addict. One particular day, one of the clients started yelling at me, saying I could not possibly understand the pain he was in because I have never been a drug addict. As he railed on about his despair, I realized that I may not understand what it is like to be a drug addict, but I did understand despair. When he finally stopped yelling at me, I said, “You are right, I can’t really understand, but help me to understand what it was like for you. I know what despair feels like, but help me understand what it feels like for you.” In that moment, whether or not I had ever been a drug addict no longer mattered to him. I allowed him to sit with his despair in the safety of my empathy and I listened to him without judgement. In that moment, we made a human connection of kindness.

We are all different. We all have had different experiences that shape who we are. We may disagree with one another, on many issues, but we share one very important thing. We are all sharing the human experience. No matter where we come from, we are all human beings. In our experiences, we have all had pain, fear, despair, some more than others, but the universal emotions are things we can all speak to, at one level or another. We all do not have to agree. There are aspects of each of our lives that others may never really understand fully, but we can listen. We can empathize with the emotions of others. We can extend kindness to connect each other. We can share love to heal wounds.  As John Lennon said, “Imagine all the people living life in peace. You...you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us and the world will be as one.” Can you imagine that? God bless!