One Action, Several Reactions

Kaylyn Riley

7/19/15

First Blog Assignment
Aka I Got Way Too Philosophical

One Action, Several Reactions

The fairly inspirational quote from the book The Five People You Meet in Heaven, "That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind," means a great bunch of things in my opinion. It refers to the simple fact that humans and animals alike are entirely connected. For example, a human drops a cookie on the ground, providing a great deal of food for a colony of ants, but the cookie also crushes a choice few insects, benefiting and also being detrimental to the colony. Any one of those benefiting ants could have been in the place of the ones that were killed by the oblivious human, and any oblivious human could have been in the place of the one who dropped the cookie. Just like in reality, tragic accidents such at 9/11 is a prime example of the meaning of this quote. The people that died that day could just have easily been any other people on any other plane, but fate chose said dead people. The quote also means that even if some things happen that aren't happy, like tragedies, everything happens for a reason. Though the freak tragedies of reality and fiction can be sad and you think back on them, noting how easily they could have been avoided all together, it can't be reversed because new life has to continue. In fiction, plot development wouldn't exist without the deliberate acts just like life wouldn't continue without death in reality. According to this quote, people could be interchanged they are so similar, maybe not in looks or brains, but they are too alike to separate.  The quote also reads "...we are all connected," and to me, it is referring to chain reactions of a sort. Take the human and the cookie again for example. The human drops his cookie, ants die but also get food for other ants. The ants that continue to live can now be well fed enough to feed the next generation.