Plucking an Invisible Thread

It's been too long since I've made a post here. It's probably because I needed awhile to catch up after a long stretch away. But even though I haven't sat down to write, there is one thing that has me fascinated. It's the whole phenomenon of recognition. Here we are on this planet, among thousands or millions of our own species.  And the members of a species look pretty much alike. Yet we can recognize each other easily if we have any acquaintance at all. It seems a miracle. We're just so used to it that we don't notice how remarkable it is. 

Take sheep, for instance. They all look pretty much alike to us. But if we were sheep, we would recognize our family members, our neighbors, the sheep from across the barnyard, everyone! How amazing!

In the case of humans, we take for granted that all of us look pretty different, and we easily recognize people with whom we've had previous contact. To a sheep, though, we probably look pretty much the same, unless our clothing makes us stand out one way or another. We all have two arms, two legs, a head, two ears, a nose, we stand up instead of crawling. Really, we're not so very much different from each other. Yet from clear across the street or a ball field, we easily recognize others. How do we do that? 

Scientists have studied recognition in animals. Like us, some animals use a mixture of senses to identify others: vision, smell, sound. Even some insects recognize individuals of their species.  Can you believe that wasps have somewhat different facial appearances which make them recognizable to their neighbors!? Bees, on the other hand, can't recognize specific individuals, but bees in one colony all have the same scent so they can recognize someone in their group. Birds, on the other hand, have distinctive calls or flight patterns. 

Sometimes animal recognition is really amazing. We've probably all seen films of mother penguins coming back from the ocean with food for the little one. And out of a huge group of hundreds of father penguins, packed together (all looking pretty much the same to us), they go straight to their mate and young one. How do they tell? Dolphins show their identity with a signature whistle. Researchers say elephants use sound, smell and especially touch (using their sensitive long trunks). And a fox, who wants to let the world know he's around, poops in the middle of the trail where the smell identifies him to other foxes. There are lots of examples where scientists conclude that recognition involves the senses of smell, sight or sound. 

I started thinking about recognition the other day when I heard a voice on TV. I was watching a baseball game, and this voice sounded like someone I knew, just the voice. I couldn't see the person. It was not someone who is usually found in a baseball broadcast, so I imagined I must be wrong. But I was right! It WAS the voice of the person I had identified. And I started thinking about what a masterpiece of fine-tuning our brains can perform, recognizing another person's voice out of millions of people in the world, hundreds of thousands of people with whom we have come in contact over the years. 

The more I've thought about the ability to recognize others of our species, the more I am convinced that our ability as living beings to recognize each other is not due just to sight, sound or smell. There are too many inexplicable instances that don't fit that equation. On a deeper level, this ability to recognize individuals has to do with communication from one individual to another, even if not intentional or conscious. These days we speak frequently about how connected we all are. And this connection is much broader than we can see or understand. I think of the mystery of always knowing my mother was calling an instant before the phone rang. There were a thousand miles between us and we didn't communicate often. But I always knew it was her. Or I remember the time when I got in my VW microbus and was putting the car in reverse when I suddenly knew I had to stop. And when I got out of the car I saw my two daughters, whom I thought were in the house, right in back of the car. Whew! Everyone has tales to tell of times when we knew something, but it couldn't be explained by our usual senses. 

Keeping all this in mind, my only conclusion is that we living beings on planet earth are linked in more ways that we can fathom. Energy moves around and through us. Thoughts have more effect that we know. The happenings on one part of the world affect the rest, just like the beat of a butterfly's wings in some faraway country starts a small movement that ultimately affects us all. We may be so connected by this invisible web surrounding us that when we see another person, or hear them, one of those web strands gets plucked. We recognize that person like we are joining the same symphony together. Call me crazy, but it's a beautiful thought.