The Vine

While filling out a profile for an online community, one of the questions asked us to submit “An idea worth sharing.”

I chose this one, from Meg Wheatley’s wonderful article Relationships: The Basic Building Blocks of Life:

“The scientific search for the basic building blocks of life has revealed a startling fact: there are none. The deeper that physicists peer into the nature of reality, the only thing they find is relationships. Even sub-atomic particles do not exist alone. One physicist described neutrons, electrons, etc. as ‘…a set of relationships that reach outward to other things.’ Although physicists still name them as separate, these particles aren’t ever visible until they’re in relationship with other particles. Everything in the Universe is composed of these ‘bundles of potentiality’ that only manifest their potential in relationship.”

The notion that we’re social creatures wired for community is so self-evident that it hardly requires scientific proof. If you have a pulse, you yearn for the companionship and touch of others. Babies die if they’re not held. And the chronicled effects of solitary confinement are alarming.

Yet it’s somehow reaffirming to learn that our desire for relationship—and the potential it unleashes in us—is embedded at the most elemental levels.

We are “bundles of potentiality.” An idea worth sharing indeed.

(NB: Meg was a speaker at The Vine ‘07. You can watch her presentation here.)