Island Living

When you live on an island, every interaction is precious. There's a finite limit on the number of people that you're going to be able to talk to. Since everyone knows everyone else, you always have to be on your best behavior.

On an island, you can't choose to ignore certain people, or make connections solely for personal gain at others' expense. You can't 'play the field' and live for one-night-flings and wild parties. In school, you can't write off certain teachers or students just because you're not compatible as BFFs. In general, you can't afford to mess up because island life isn't full of an endless supply of people for you to 'start over' with. You get one chance to make a first impression, and that impression matters.

In America, the place where the islands come together, the spirit of 'island life' is often lost in the crowd, in the busy-ness (or business?) of daily living, in just trying to scrape by. In hard times, we often focus on ourselves, and the notion of feeling any connection with others is reduced to whether or not "they were nice to me first". This is a betrayal of one of the most practical aspects of our ancestry…because we all came here from somewhere else. We’re all “island people”, in a manner of speaking.

Island life, community life, family life – call it whatever – relies on every individual participating as part of a larger whole. The whole nourishes the individual, and simultaneously, the individual nourishes the whole. Break this cycle and you break a community. Perhaps that’s what we’re seeing in our world right now.

It's time to stop voting people off of the island.

How would our lives change if we treated EVERYONE as someone important?