There is a strange thought that has followed me for a long time.

Perhaps you have had it too, although you may have pushed it away because some thoughts are uncomfortable precisely because they refuse to leave us alone.

What, after all, is the difference between you and me?

Is it the colour of your eyes? The shape of your face? The body you were given before you had any understanding of what a body was? Your religion, perhaps or your disbelief? Your kindness? My cruelty? My love for cats and your inexplicable hatred of them?

We collect these differences carefully, as though they were proof.

I am this. You are that.

And then we build our lives upon this little distinction.

But sometimes I wonder whether the distinction is real at all.

You did not choose to be born.

Neither did I.

You did not choose your parents, your childhood, the country into which you opened your eyes, the language that first gave names to the things around you. You did not choose the face in the mirror. You did not choose the temperament that followed you through childhood, nor the wounds that later taught you suspicion. You did not choose every humiliation, every affection, every accident that slowly assembled the person you now call yourself. Neither did I, and yet, somehow, we stand before one another and say:

“This is who I am.”

But who is this I?

Perhaps you are yourself because of the particular circumstances that happened to you. Perhaps I am myself for exactly the same reason. Give your childhood to me, your parents, your fears, your victories, your losses, your body, your memories, your particular sequence of accidents, and perhaps I would become you.

Not metaphorically.

Maybe, given precisely the same life, I would think precisely the same thoughts and make precisely the same choices.

And maybe you would become me.

That thought is both beautiful and terrifying, because if it is true, then the boundary between us becomes very thin,  what we call individuality will only become the universe looking at itself from a different window.

One window sees poverty.

Another sees wealth.

One sees love.

Another sees abandonment.

One becomes gentle because the world was gentle enough to allow gentleness.

Another becomes cruel because somewhere along the road cruelty became, in his eyes, the only language in which the world could be answered.

And we stand before him and say,

“How could you become such a person?”

But maybe the more difficult question is:

“What would I have become if I had lived his life?”

I do not mean that every action becomes excusable merely because it has a history. That would be too easy. A terrible act remains terrible. A wound does not cease to be a wound simply because we understand where the knife came from.

But understanding is different from forgiveness.

To understand someone is simply to look at the road behind them before judging the place where they have arrived.

The cruelest man in the world may still believe himself to be the hero of his own story.

And that is perhaps the most frightening thing about being human.

We rarely experience ourselves as villains.

We experience ourselves as people who were hurt, people who were misunderstood, people who were forced, people who had no choice, people who were merely defending themselves.

Everyone carries a private explanation for their sins.

And perhaps the person standing opposite you in an argument is doing exactly what you are doing.

Trying to make sense of himself.

You are looking at the world through the wounds that made you.

He is doing the same.

And suddenly the argument becomes something stranger than an argument.

It becomes two histories colliding.

Two childhoods.

Two collections of fears.

Two different versions of suffering insisting that they are right.

So perhaps tolerance does not begin with agreeing with another person.

Perhaps it begins much earlier.

It begins when we are able to look at someone and think:

If I had carried your memories, perhaps I would have spoken with your voice.

That thought does not make us identical.

It makes us responsible for remembering how fragile our differences really are.

And then there is the final, almost absurd possibility.

What if we really are one?

What if consciousness is not divided in the way we imagine it to be? What if there is only one vast existence, looking through billions of eyes, forgetting itself each time, only to rediscover itself in another human being?

Then every person you have loved was another expression of yourself.

Every stranger you ignored was another expression of yourself.

Every person you wounded,  yourself.

And every act of kindness, however small, was something you had done to yourself without knowing it.

Perhaps the universe is an egg.

And we are all inside it, separated for a little while by bodies, names, memories and circumstances, believing with extraordinary seriousness that we are separate beings.

That makes life nothing more than the long education of a single soul!

It is born here as a child.

There, as a beggar.

Somewhere else, as a mother.

Somewhere else, as a murderer.

It loves.

It loses.

It becomes proud.

It becomes broken.

It forgives.

It refuses to forgive.

It dies.

And then, perhaps, it opens its eyes somewhere else. Learning, slowly and painfully, what it means to be human. I do not know if any of this is true, or maybe it is only a beautiful story invented by a frightened species that cannot bear the thought of being alone.

And if the strange philosophy of the egg contains any truth, then these histories are not ultimately as separate as they appear.

We spend our lives saying I, because we must. It is the grammar of being alive. But there may come a moment when the grammar changes, the shell cracks, the little private world opens.

And looking back, we discover that what we had called separation was only the condition under which we were able to learn.

The egg was never merely around us.

We were the egg, and everything within it was part of the same unfinished life.

Perhaps we have been meeting ourselves all along.

And if there is even the smallest possibility that the person standing before me is not as separate from me as I believe

then perhaps I should be a little more careful with him.

Because maybe, somewhere beneath all these faces and names, there has never really been a you and an I.

Perhaps there has only ever been us.

And maybe, inside this strange little egg we call the universe, we are all the same soul, learning, through one another, what it means to become human.