Relax, you do not have to do it alone!  The whole weight of the world is not on your shoulders.  That is not the way the universe is designed.

Every person has responsibilities and you have to do your part, whatever it is but no one is totally independent.

It is all relative.  Each person is dependent on the other.  The whole world is interdependent on each other for supplying each others’ needs.  You need people to maintain your electricity, your road.

You need farmers to raise your crops, some of which ends up in your local supermarket.  The material for your cell phone had to come from somewhere.  There has to be towers built to transfer the signal.  And that is just the start.  Are you getting the idea?

And some of the people are so disconnected with this.  I had a customer complain once because there were flecks of dirt on her bunch of celery.  Like it was revolutionary for a person to discoverer that food is usually grown in dirt.

We take so many things for granted.  The person who thinks he/she is independent of others is nursing an illusion.  You depend on others for all kinds of services.

There is an upside to this:  you do not have to do it alone.  And that realization can be freeing.  Just do the part you are called to.  Others will do their part in the scheme of things.  And you can relax as a result.

I don’t have to be ashamed when I don’t know something.  I used to be but no longer.  I think of the passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essay “Self- Reliance”:  ‘There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance’…

When you are ashamed of what you don’t know you are comparing yourself to someone else.  I had to accept who I was, whatever my portion of knowledge I possessed and go on from there.

Comparing myself to someone else just got in the way.  I had to accept who I was.  There would always be others who knew more and conversely who knew less.

My body of knowledge started off with me, whatever my limitations and that was the way it was.  Envy, which had turned  into shame, just got in the way.  Every time I read those lines of Emerson’s I could relax.  I no longer had to be ashamed of what I did not know.