Take a deep breath and slowly let it out.

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In one of the standard freshman chemistry textbooks, there was an end-of-chapter problem that asked how many molecules breathed by Abraham Lincoln during his Gettysburg address were in that deep breath you just took. The problem gave some basic assumptions that were overly simplistic, but the answer ended up being a couple hundred. Of course, that is a very tiny fraction of the molecules you just inhaled, but it is not zero. If we did the same kind of calculation with people who are currently in the same room with you, the number would be much higher.

Similarly, that glass of water you just drank? There were undoubtedly water molecules in there that had … ummm … passed through dinosaurs.

The food you just ate contains atoms and molecules that have been part of countless living organisms as well as components of the air and the soil that we all share.

Carl Sagan famously said “We are made of starstuff,” to which I’d like to add: we are made of the same stuff.

Literally.

Our ideas and thoughts aren’t ours alone either. Like the molecules we consume by breathing, eating or drinking, we constantly take in information, ideas, and experiences and churn them around in our brains, often subconsciously. Even the most creative thinkers are influenced in direct and nuanced ways by others. We may THINK we have our own ideas, but it is like having our own molecules. We get to use them, hold them, and hopefully transform them into something new during the short time we are alive.

I think that these are good times to remember that there is no them or us. There is no me or you. We are temporary collections of shared atoms and ideas passing through the universe– nodes, if you will, in the continuum of matter and imagination.

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