Thought's for today's challenge

“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
                                                                     Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
 
 
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lived as a powerful example of being courageous and taking a stand for all of us to finally come together as a community of people living in a world with true equality and social justice for all of us.  Each of us as individuals can take that stand now as the world is calling us to “To be the change we wish to see in the world.”  Mahatma Gandhi.
 
This great awakening can only come when we finally come together as one human family.  We can finally begin to find our abilities to listen to each other with respect and compassion.  As we share our different points of view, we need to listen and speak from our hearts.  When working with young children, I used to teach them to listen to each other with their ears and their hearts. 
 
This is a lost art for many of us.  We are so dedicated to our own points of view that we are unable to listen to another side.  How are we ever going to come together in our society and expand our thinking process to include our different points of view?
 
It reminds me of the tale of blind men and an elephant.  “It is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and conceptualize what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true.” (From Wikipedia)
 
I don’t know how we are ever going to find a way to live in a new sustainable reality unless we take a broader look and begin to think outside of the box for better solutions.  It seems obvious that the solutions we have tried are not working. 
 
What I am committed to do is to begin listening to other points of view using my heart as well as my ears.  What has been their experiences, their pain, and beliefs?  What does their piece of the elephant look like, knowing that this piece is as real as my own version?  Maybe when we all share our perceptions of the elephant, we can create a beautiful whole and finally become one human family.  This is my dream.