One of the links in my Trough of useful sources is to what used to be called Brain Pickings but has now been retitled The Marginalian. I receive regular emails with short essays on a whole range of subjects which often contain things that are very insightful.
In this blog I don’t often directly share these things as my underlying philosophy suggests that each of us should be serendipitously happening on our own sources of inspiration, confirmation or wisdom. This is one of the exceptions as today’s email is about the benefits of a thin skin – not in the colloquial sense of the opposite of being able to withstand insults and the like – i.e. having a thick skin. No this is to do with the physical aspect of a literal thin skin and the sense of being closer to what is outside of us.
Interconnectedness is a frequent visitor to my writing – knowing that we are each connected to everyone and everything is a much needed piece of knowledge to reduce our ignorance. Just one little quote from the essay sort of sums it up in relation to my own worldview.
The lack of acknowledgement that you “can’t change just one thing” will immediately provoke and rouse the law of unintended consequences and the equally inevitable later of response of “I didn’t realise that would happen”.
We would do well to thin our own skin in this regard realising that the effects of our actions will reverbrate throughout a much wider sphere of existence than we might initially suspect.