Millions have passed through here

Every fear you feel today, and every wish for safety or food or closeness or comfort, somebody else has known before you. To want to be safe, to be fed, to find someone who will hold you, to avoid pain, to feel that you have a place with somebody: all of this is older than human languages, and none of it is yours alone. In this theme we look again at the things you are carrying and put them in that setting, as if you were standing in a long queue of everyone who lived before you and met the same experience, or something like it.

A researched practice

This framing goes back to Paul Gilbert: that we all find ourselves here, in a body and a mind we did not ask for, alongside other living things that also want to be safe and not to suffer. He set the idea out in his book The Compassionate Mind (2009) and in his lectures, drawing as well on a much older Buddhist practice.

The same idea appears in psychology under the concept of common humanity, one of the three components of self-compassion in Kristin Neff’s model (2003). That model has the wider research base of the two, and its components are associated in reviews with lower levels of anxiety and depression, with one important caveat: most of this research is correlational, so it does not always tell us which thing is causing which.

There is a clear risk here. Put badly, the idea of common humanity turns into "everybody has problems". That is not comfort. It makes light of what the person is feeling. This is why the theme needs real examples and specific people, rather than general talk about "human beings".

The point is not to tell yourself "never mind, everyone suffers". It is to find something quieter: that what I feel now does not make me a stranger to the rest of the living world. It makes me one of them.

Loneliness has a particular shape. It is not only being without people. It is the feeling that what is happening to you resembles nobody else. But most of what you want is not particular to you. You want to be safe, to be fed, to have someone hold you, to not be in pain, to feel you have a place with another person. You did not invent these wants. They came into life with you, and they came with everyone before you, and with many of the animals that share our characteristics too.

Try to look at them across time, and not only from where you are standing. Behind you is a long line of living things. Not one of them chose to exist, and even so they wanted many of the things you want now. Your fear is very old. The person feeling it today is new. The feeling itself is not.

This does not mean that what you carry is small or unimportant. A thing does not become less real because it is common. But it can become less strange. Being one of many does not mean you are nothing. It means you are not alone. You are not the first person to lose someone dear, or the first to know need and poverty, or the first to lose a job, or the first to fail an exam. More than that: you are not experiencing these feelings in some unique way, or for the first time.

There is something else you may notice. When you write what you are going through as something old and shared, the shape of other people changes too. The colleague, the neighbour, the person who was cold with you today, all of them are carrying bodies and minds they did not choose, and each one of them lives with his own fears and wants in his own way. They all resemble you, and they all pass through moments like these. You can pick some of the people you know who went through the same experience, and bring them into your writing.

A simple way to start: take the worry you are living with today, and write underneath it: I am not the first to feel this. Then write to prove that sentence. Write the names, the faces, the stories, and whoever you can imagine before you.

For instance

I was thinking about money until I could not sleep, and then I thought about my grandfather, who came here with nothing, and who must have known this kind of sleeplessness too. All my life I have pictured him calm, but perhaps he was not always calm. Perhaps he was only further along the same road than I am.
I felt something shared while I was writing about a cat hiding under a car in the rain, looking for somewhere dry. That is exactly what is happening to me: I want a place where I feel safe. It is not a problem in my character. It is a very old wish to find somewhere safe, and millions share it with me, maybe billions, and even this cat is one of them.

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Today's prompt

Write about something that is on your mind these days. Write it first as you feel it now, and then look at it as something very old that many people have known before you. Who wanted this before you? Who feared the same thing? Who lived with it in your family, or in your city, or hundreds of years ago? And which other creatures may have felt something close to it? At the end, write what changes in how you feel when you stop seeing what you are going through as something that belongs to you alone.

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