Last night I was on the phone with someone thousands of miles away. One third of this lonely planet separates us. Through the phone I heard a crow cawing in the sunshine. One, inconsequential crow. I pondered—for a moment—how much has had to happen for me to hear that bird. 1/

How many thousands of lovers conjoined their bodies at just the right moment, across eons. How many cataclysms—of guns and germs—were survived. How many fearful journeys my forebears made and how much they suffered and sacrificed in their own small existences. 2/

I thought about the phone in my hand. This marvel of technology that sits among some many other marvels of human ingenuity. Electricity. Transistors. Glass. Metal. Radio. So on and so forth. All the result of other human lives and their unswerving dedication to invention. 3/

And my own life. How many people have poured themselves into making me who I am. My education. My good health. My career. The weekly removal of my rubbish. Immunisations. The food in my pantry. The coffee in my cup. The millions of timely and tiny actions that averted tragedy. 4/

All of that, plus so much more. Every last innumerable element being no more or less consequential to my arrival at this one moment—a moment in which the echoing caw of a solitary crow I will never see and who will never see me briefly entered my consciousness. 5/

Every moment we live is like that—the ceaseless summation of an ever-growing collection of other moments. Our connections to one another are so diffuse and so deep and so irrevocable. None of us is an island.

In depression, people ponder who would miss them if they were gone.

The answer is that everything and everyone and every life on the planet, from the fishmonger in Chennai to your kindergarten teacher to the crow in a tall pine tree would miss them in a billion, trillion, infinite unseen ways.

The whole world would be changed forever. There is no escaping the consequences of our shared existences.

Sometimes, it’s crushing to think about.

Sometimes, you hear a crow and think “oh...that bird is very far away. Neat.”