It is incredibly easy to move through modern life under the grand illusion of absolute independence. We punch our clocks, manage our households and guard our personal boundaries with fierce pride, convinced that our choices exist in a vacuum.

We like to think of ourselves as standalone entities, weathering life’s storms completely on our own merit.

But a stubborn refusal to admit we need one another doesn’t change the physics of the world we actually live in. Whether we care to confess it or not, we are deeply, inextricably tangled together. When our perspective gets foggy, I find it helps to look both backward into our history and upward into the night sky to find a clearer lens.

The 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi captured our human dilemma beautifully through a simple, striking image: a darkened room lined entirely with mirrors, with a single burning candle placed dead-center.

To someone standing in the doorway, it looks like a chaotic explosion of a thousand different fires. But step closer and the illusion fades. There aren’t thousands of lights; there is only one. The multi-faceted display is just a trick of geometry. Rumi’s teaching reminds us that we are those mirrors, each reflecting a single, shared spark of humanity.

If that sounds too abstract, consider that modern cosmology arrived at the exact same conclusion using equations instead of poetry.

The late astrophysicist Carl Sagan famously reminded us that the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth and the carbon in our DNA were cooked billions of years ago in the hearts of collapsing stars. We are not external visitors dropped onto a cold planet; we grew out of it.

As Sagan put it, the universe is no longer “out there” while we are “here.” We are the universe.

When you follow that rationale to its logical edge, a striking truth emerges: Connection is the only irresistible reality, and separation is the illusion.

For me, this cosmic truth isn’t just a theory to ponder; it is a daily, visible reality. It is one of the primary reasons I fell in love with this island community. Living in Wrangell has a way of stripping away the myth of isolation. Here, surrounded by water, the boundaries we build around ourselves quickly dissolve. 

You can’t pretend your choices exist in a vacuum when the ripples of everything you do hit the shore just a few miles away. The inescapable closeness of this place forces us to see that our connection plays in the streets we walk and the neighbors we pass. We are angled in such a way that I bounce light onto you, and you cast warmth back onto me.

Once you embrace this truth, the rules of how we treat each other shift from a burden of moral duty to a matter of practical survival. Hurting you is  an act of self-sabotage. When I cause you harm, I tear at the very tapestry I depend on to keep me warm.

Conversely, when I help you, I help myself. When your path gets brighter, so does mine.

Admitting this level of interdependence doesn’t mean erasing our individuality. It simply requires a healthy, grounded perspective.

We can spend our short time on this Earth fighting our own reflections in the glass, throwing stones and wondering why the world feels so fractured. Or we can stop, look across the room and realize we are all standing in the same space, leaning on one another’s clarity and forged from the same stars.