We’re all familiar with the cliché about the goldfish that doesn’t know it’s swimming in water. We’re less aware that we human beings swim in our own water, and we’re just as unaware as is the goldfish that we do so.
The question is, what is our water?
It is a bath of ideas that condition everything we know, or even can know. Our identity. Our place in the world. How the world works. Do’s and don’t’s. We don’t know why we know so many of the things we know, and why we don’t know so many of things we don’t know. It’s just there, and it conditions our entire existence. It’s our version of the goldfish’s water.
One of the most important things we “know” for a certainty is that we’re all separate, and distinct. One of the things we know less well is that we’re also all connected. Just as much as we’re all islands, we are all just as surely part of a vast archipelago, seemingly separated by water, but connected at a more profound level underneath.
ODFL is about discovering the unknown connections that are our true nature. Doing so not only enriches our understanding of the world and our place in it, it helps us improve things for everybody. When we understand our essential connectedness, we will quickly be able to improve the human condition, for the betterment of all.
Remember John Donne? He wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”
We are not separate, at least not altogether. That’s why we feel bigger when we help someone else. We’re helping ourselves. It’s why that improvement of the human condition is within our reach. Because we all feel the same thing: bigger when we help others.
This blog will explore both the abstractions and the practicalities of making the world a better place. It will explore the “out there” as well as the here at home. What’s inside of us. What’s outside. And what’s between.
We look forward to sharing our mission with you.
ODFL
