Room for differences

At a point in time, I came to read an article in the Dainish Railways passenger magazine Ud og Se from April 2012 about the Danish poet Søren Ulrik Thomsen.
He was quoted for the following, which I have also heard other people say, but never exactly as Søren Ulrik Thomsen does (in my feeble attempt of translation):

When I am annoyed with and very critical towards another person these days, I try to discipline myself and think of everything that is unique to him or her. The things that only this person can do, the things which I would miss if that person was no longer in the world. 

You can catch yourself thinking that there is a double-sidedness in this - that while thinking about what you would miss, you can seek some perverse pleasure by thinking this other human being dead. But apparently this is not what drives Søren Ulrik Thomsen. As he says in the following sentence: "It is a great poverty and folly not to be able to sense other people in all their diversity." Now, this is most certainly something we can learn from.(Translated from Rummelighed for forskellighed, originally published July 28th, 2012)

Golden - and other - rules

It is usually a good general rule of thumb, rooted in the words of Christ - sometimes even called the Golden Rule - that we should do to other as as we wish them to do to ourselves - although George Bernard Shaw meant that "you should not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you, as their tastes may not be the same".
And you do not have to read many formative stories for kids to see that it may be excessive simplification - as soon as you have seen the rabbit treat the cat with carrots and in turn be invited to eat fish, you find that the Golden Rule can not stand alone by itself.

Image courtesy of pixabay / DasWortgewand

But then I recently encountered a quote by British literary theorist Terry Eagleton:

Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone's different needs.

- which could be considered to be an appropriate trade-off between Shaw and the Golden Rule.
Eagleton may be said to have a point here - the only problem is that it's so easy to use the Golden Rule. If you have to pay equal attention to the needs of other people, it requires that you actually understand the needs of others. But if we consider it carefully, then we quickly come to realize that it's worth the effort.
(Translated from Gyldne - og andre - regler)

Islands in the archipelago of mankind

It happens that I get past text I've written years back and want to modify a little bit in the details of the metaphors and thoughts that the text expresses. Thus the following is inspired by a text that is almost eight years old - so maybe it's about time to refresh it a bit.
I have - as it may be known - a fondness for John Donne's words from his Reflection XVII from 1624, with the familiar introduction:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind...

I think John Donne was absolutely right at that time - people of the 17th century were completely aware that they were dependent on each other. But, if we are to stay with the metaphor, the waters came flooding in over humanity and transformed us into an archipelago where we can be tempted to believe that we are islands, even though we are connected just below the surface. But the archipelago is in any case so densely covered with islands that we can easily see from coast to coast and make bridges to neighbouring isles. With today's technology, we can even see the distant islands and communicate with them far easier than you could communicate with most places on the continent of humanity in Donne's time.
The problem is however that we can just as easily retreat to the middle of our islands, turn our backs towards the coast and gaze into the ground as we let the hair grow long and our vocabulary degenerate into inarticulate grunts and murmur. But it's our duty to do the opposite: instead, we must go down to the coast; follow it around our islands; make it clear to ourselves how close the surrounding islands are to us and consider how we overcome the distance going there. And it's not a particularly unpleasant duty - it's not even difficult if we just decide to make the small effort it takes.
(Translated from Øer i menneskehedens øhav, originally published October 16th, 2017)