Empathy

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts...half owing to the numbers who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs - George Eliot, Middlemarch

Authoritative lists of supposed global role models provoke approval and controversy in equal measure, but also raise the more important question: who is honouring the vastly greater number of non-celebrity role models among our human family of perhaps 7.8 billion alive today?

For me the purpose of life is to know other people…is to discover what life is. Who inhabits the world? What is it to be human? What can I give to the world which it doesn’t have…a gift for tolerating my presence in this world..…and unless I know the people, I can’t know what it does not have - Theodore Zeldin

Imagining seeing how everybody else lives, just for one day.  Life In A Day was a historic global experiment to create a user-generated feature film shot in a single day, July 24 2010.

As we pass the 70th anniversary of Dylan Thomas' death - or rather his work - has remained dear to me, one way of another, for nearly 40 years, from his poems, through the biographies I consumed at Edinburgh and subsequently, a profile on Great Lives and an excellent BBC commentary on Under Milk Wood.

During a guided "green meditation" in the summer of 2023, while focusing my attention on the beauty of a nearby plant, I was reminded of Thomas' The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

During dark days of worsening refugee crises and increasing populism, can we still imagine reaching a state of "xenophilia"...overcoming our "homophily", i.e. the love of that which is like us, and reaching the love of that which is different?

Indeed, if we're ever going to care enough about conflict, genocide, poverty, hunger etc. enough to act on them properly, then we need to try much harder to avoid conflict with people we might not yet fully understand.

If the past is replayed too fast, life seems futile, and humanity resembles water flowing from a tap, straight down the drain.  A film of history for today needs to be in slow motion, showing every person who ever lived as a star, though dimly visible in a night sky, a history still unexplored - Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity

A call to action. Time to explore these unexplored histories together.