Imagine you're attending a family reunion. Relax! Your uncle John won't be there, and as you're only imagining you won't have to talk to your grandma about that awkward situation at last years Christmas party.
Imagine your family decides to do the conga: they're that type of family. You take the lead, and your father grabs your shoulders. His father grabs his shoulders and so on. As this party is imaginary even the dead are invited, so long as they don't upset Aunt Bethel, and the conga line can stretch back for generations, say 1,000 fathers or more. This is the reason you always hold your family reunions in very large venues.
This conga line is your family history, and the reason that you are alive. Every single person in that conga line, managed, without fail, to reproduce and father offspring at least once. If anyone of them had failed you would not exist. If you broke away from the conga and walked down the line, you would also notice subtle changes as the generations pass. 10 generations back your family didn't have your prominent pointy chin. 30 generations back their ears were bigger. 50 generations back it's hard to find any family resemblance at all. If you could go back even further than the 1,000 generations, you would eventually find that the faces start to become less and less human, and the conga-ing less and less civilised. If you walked far enough back your ancestors would be too small for you to see.
This is the story of human evolution, albeit including a conga line. Most of us are familiar with this idea. But what we sometimes forget is that every living thing alive today has a similar conga line all of its own. Your hamster has a line of ancestors that run back for thousands of generations. And somewhere in his conga line, is an ancestor who is also in yours. It's true! If you go back far enough you and Hammy are cousins.
And it's not just Hammy you're related too. You're related to your guinea pig too! And the parasites living in Hammy's fur. Even the straw that lines Hammy's cage. Everything that lives or has ever lived is related to you.
We've all heard this before but we tend to brush it off as an idea, rather than a reality. But it is a reality! Think about this the next time your outside. That tree is your relative. That bird is your cousin. That butterfly is family.
When you look at the world this way, you cease to be single soul and join with the whole of creation. Every living thing in the world is family. Every creature, plant and cell shares a part of you.
Treat every person, animal, and plant as family, and you'll never feel alone again. All of nature, the whole of your massive extended family, is there, experiencing their own family trials, right along beside you.
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