When the Greeks, the founders of what may be considered Western civilisation, philosophy and theatre were major players on the world stage, claiming new territories as their own and taking the resources to bring back home they referred to the inhabitants of these places as Barbarians, for all they could hear is bar, bar, bar. They could not understand another culture’s language or way of being or weren’t willing or interested enough to learn. Nothing much has changed as far as our behaviour towards other cultures or creatures is concerned. Humans arrive in an unfamiliar place and we have to either adapt to the culture and try create a space for ourselves to fit in or we remain isolated and form our own community forcing other communities, sometimes begrudgingly to accept our presence. We have all these different cultures and creatures living together, sharing the same environment and we cannot or are unwilling to communicate with each other and yet we are dependent on the same resources.  

We need more than anything to recognize this about our inter-dependent state of existence if we are to do more than survive on this life-giving planet. It is through this conscious awareness and compassion for ourselves that we can recognize our interdependent nature and rather than fear the unknown we can approach life in all its forms as a part of ourselves and thus something we need to respect as having its place and purpose in syntropy with humans. 

What we’re feeling, thinking, emitting and receiving from others as forms of communication is all part of life. Through our consciousness of life we can learn to change the stories and states associated with our behaviour by recognizing that what we are experiencing in the present is not fixed but ever changing and malleable. Even what we may believe now as permanent and cannot be changed, like the past, is not fixed. We say, 'You can’t change the past but you can change how you see it'. Our experiences in between continuously reshape how we remember the past in the present. It may seem fixed by our constant repetition of the same story pattern but even the words, though still the same no longer have the same meaning. We experience them like we experience ourselves over time, growing older as the body and the meaning of life changes with it.  

Change the story or our way of consciously experiencing it in the present and we realise it is no longer the same story and we may be not be able to retrace our steps and relive our experiences as we did when first experienced. Our present shapes our past and try as we may to re-member our lives as once lived, with each telling there is a slight variation, sometimes imperceptible yet there, like the face that greets us in the mirror each day, seemingly the same, yet different and dependent on so many things, like our waking thoughts and dreams before we awoke and observed ourselves and our thoughts in the present.