connecting

I recently read an article about two Indian men shot in a bar outside Kansas City. One was killed. Before the incident, the shooter had yelled, "Get out of my country."

My country.

Hate crimes like this cannot continue. America itself was founded by immigrants who came to a land previously solely inhabited by the Native American Indians. The story of the Mayflower and the Pilgrims is a story of immigration. This country does not "belong" to anyone-we can embrace it as a country we love, but the world is merely our temporary home. What has led us to forget that we are all the same?

I studied physical therapy in graduate school. One of our first tasks was to dissect human cadavers. I dreaded the first day we went into the lab. I was sure I would faint, or vomit, or have a mental breakdown and be kicked out of graduate school before I had even started. I feared the unknown.

But a strange thing happened. Because after the initial shock of seeing a deceased human set in and the work began, I realized something: the human body tells us a beautiful story. A story that is often overlooked. And this is the story:

Beneath the exterior, the brown skin, the black skin, the white skin, the red/orange/yellow/green/purple skin, lies a network of veins and arteries, ligaments and tendons, the same beating heart, the same lungs that fill with air, the same organs that help sustain life. Beneath the faces lined with wrinkles that tell of a similar suffering of the world's hardships lies a network of nerves and muscles that created our ability to sense those hardships. And guess what? The color of all of these anatomical features is exactly the same regardless of exterior color.

Of course, there are minor differences in the exact shade of the veins that carry oxygen depleted blood to the heart. There are minor differences in the red of the blood that pours out from a once pulsating, beating, life-sustaining heart. There are minor differences in the origins and attachments of our muscles, in the way our organs sit within the body cavity. But these minor differences are not unique to a certain ethnic race. These minor differences are subtle enough that they do not take away from the fact that regardless of the exterior, we all come from one source.

What has happened to the idea of unity? The majority of the world's many religions believe in this idea, that we all come from one source. That we are living here temporarily. That the world does not belong to us, but that it is a gift that we get to appreciate for our short time here.

So what has happened that we value division and labels so much so that we allow hate to spill into our country like the blood that spills through our arteries? What has happened that we value individualism over oneness so much so that forget that beneath the exterior, the temporary, we are all the same?

In cadaver lab I likened the network of arteries and veins to a network of roads. Roads lead us to places, roads link cities, they link highways and they link lives. They allow us to travel, to see and experience this life for what it is. Our arteries and veins link our individual bodies together but they also link us together as an entire human race. What I learned in graduate school is that our veins and arteries, despite whoever's body they might be in, follow the same scientific guidelines. They do the same thing. Just as each road serves the same basic purpose, so too do our bodies.

My prayer, my wish, my truest desire is this:

Let us not see each other from the outside. Let us not let sight dictate what we hate. Let us try to remember that beneath all that we can see is a similar intricate network of life-sustaining elements. Let us learn that no matter what, everyone experiences the ups and downs of life. We experience death and grief, we experience forms of addiction and isolation, we experience forms of hate and exclusion.

And let us learn that there is beauty. That the most beautiful part of life is the connections we share. And that it is these connections that can relieve the sufferings of life. It is in the connections we make, the links between our bodies, the remembrance that we are all the same, that we find the beauty, the love in life.