Sharing
With you I’d like to share it.
Some of the key life-lessons I’ve learned from children's nursery rhymes, songs, and poems. Take the concept of ‘sharing’ for instance. If I saw someone who really needed something I had; I’d probably share. I’ve recently had the opportunity to conduct usability & ethnographic studies where children were the subjects. The more I immersed myself in their environment, and communities, the stronger my belief grew that learning to share is a key life-lesson resulting in two types of adults: sharers, and non-sharers.
Many adults are, at heart, sharers or non-sharers. I find, when you look beyond the veneers we all develop to interact with the society we all live in, we all fall into these two groups. Understanding the core concept of sharing can be learned in kindergarden, but can take a lifetime to master the nuances. Sharing is the thread that binds us together as communities.
I’ve noticed that sharers fundamentally distrust non-sharers; and because there isn’t really anyway for us to determine sharers from non-sharers, we’re often suspect of anyone until we know how well they understand sharing. We know non-sharers exist, but also know that we’re all in this together and we need to work together to survive. We know it’s better to be a part of a community than to be alone. (In general)
When I was growing up, my grandparents taught me how important sharing things with my brother was. I trusted my grandparents, and felt good sharing with my brother. I felt so good about sharing, that one day, at the mall, I gave my mittens to a homeless man warming his hands by the entrance. I’ll always remember my grandmother pulling my aside, and telling me that it’s nice to share with others, but there’s a difference between sharing and charity. Sharing means enjoying it together.
As a community member, I pay taxes, I contribute to charities and community organizations. I work, I help my neighbours, I participate in Halloween. I live in a city, I pay for electricity, water, gas, etc. When I was 6, I slept well thinking that people, incomprehensibly smart, were running my city; making sure non-sharers weren’t taking advantage of us sharers. More recently, I haven’t had that same kind of sleep. I feel like the non-sharers have infiltrated the positions of trust we’ve created in our society.
I’m not a political science major, but I follow it from time to time. I like being able to elect people I think are smarter, more capable of leading, more honest, and more trustworthy than me. It’s been a long time since I was inspired to vote for anyone because I truly believed these qualities were present in the candidate. Our system of government seems to rely on having access to genuinely good people who care about the quality of life everyone within their community has. I feel like many of those genuinely good people, genuine sharers, don’t have that killer instinct that non-sharers have. Perhaps, that’s the reason we have the leaders we have.
Sharing feels good. Being taken advantage of, being lied to, being shamed, and being endangered feels bad. We need people in power who deeply understand sharing, and are able to instil that concept in others. We need the innovative and eloquent to point their focus toward something more noble than being ‘in power’ — something like making our next generation better at sharing.
