Everyone's Gift

Everyone’s personal gift, at some level, reduces down to the ability to bring other people to life. ⁣

⁣It’s not woo, despite sounding dangerously close. ⁣

⁣Consider human evolution. Some say that the Universe is a friendly place, but the human system has been most greatly shaped by a natural environment that has been trying to kill it and eat it every day for millennia. ⁣

⁣Humans aren’t that strong. We’re not that fast. Before tools and fire, we sat huddled in caves at night knowing that just about anything could snatch us up and tear us to pieces if it wanted to. ⁣

⁣That shaped our hardware. We need to coordinate. We need numbers. We need as much aliveness on our side of the survival equation as possible.⁣

⁣So when you really see or hear about that person coming to life because of that thing you did, or what you made, or how you said what you said — there are physiological pathways older than we can imagine telling us “this is the way.” ⁣

⁣And I think the more we start to really pay attention to what we are doing when we feel most like ourselves — and when those around us seem most like themselves in response — that we’ve found something worth shaping ourselves around.

Matthew Tolstoy