Drops In The Ocean

~A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, p. 102

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Yesterday, I went to the grocery store (avec masque, naturellement) and happened on a group of mini bottles of hand sanitizer. I hadn’t seen those for weeks and so I purchased two. One for my car and one to carry with me through the travels of the day. For the last several days I’d been finding, here and there, items restocked that had been missing in the store aisles for a couple of months, as their supply chains responded as quickly as they could to the rush of fear-buying.

As the stay-at-home processes kicked in, we noticed that the environment, not burdened with trying to overcome the stresses of human consumption and subsequent waste, was healing itself. Mother Earth, like living creatures, was doing her best to renew itself, even as the current administration was pulling back environmental protections meant to protect our earthly home.

I have mused that this deadly virus was a wake up call by nature or God to say, “Hey, what are you folks doing here?” Perhaps this plague, I've considered, is retribution for treating this unearned, beautiful, abundant gift we have in our natural world with such disdain.

But I digress. I don’t really have any grounds for believing the situation we are in has been caused by any divine meddling or messaging or clean up (See “Noah and the Ark”), but it does reinforce the idea that we are all interconnected. A touch on one part of the web disturbs other parts of the web. Plastic in the water eventually will affect the quality of the water and that which is sustained by it. If we haven’t learned that by now, if we haven’t figured out the demand for any good in Boise is supplied by all sorts of processes that are likely to have started continents away, then we haven’t been observing or thinking. 

The same is true, as Sertillanges says, about knowledge.  In fact, all fields of endeavor - from knowledge creation to application to unintended consequences of that application to reconnoitering to drawing from something different to re-configuring what we know and what we can do and how we relate to each other physically, in both technical and philosophical senses, is interrelated.  In that sense, everything is one thing. 

I think the first place I heard the metaphor that every drop of water in the ocean, is the ocean was from Abraham Joshua Heschel. In the ocean of knowledge, all drops of “what we think we know” are part of the whole universe (and universes) of what is known, not-yet-known, and never-will-be-known. 

And thus it is part of our job, as humans, to keep the web repaired, the ocean unpolluted, the supply chain of life supplied– pick your metaphor - all of them, healthy, generative, and re-generative. 

Selfishly, looking out not just for ourselves but for others keeps us from tainting our own water hole (another metaphor).  Virtuously, looking out for ourselves at the expense of others is just wrong. 

Everything is connected to everything. We are all parts of the body, parts of a whole.  We are the whole. 

We are the ocean and we are the raindrops falling into ourselves.