One thing that everyone on Earth has in common with everyone else on Earth is that during the course of our day-to-day striving we remain profoundly unaware of almost every other person in existence. It’s not our fault. No one has the bandwidth to keep track of any but the tiniest portion of the 6.9 billion human souls currently alive at any given moment.
Still, TakePart believes in the intrinsic value of recognizing the masses of men, women and children that exist outside of each of us as being importantly linked to us, whether those neighbors live a few city blocks away or on some remote distance of the planet.
It’s an axiom that in this age of fiber optic technology and supersonic travel that all the citizens of the globe are more tightly interlocked than at any time in the history of civilization. Still, the vast, vast majority of us remain strangers to one another.
Perhaps, if we spent some time looking beyond our surface differences, we would see and know how much alike we all are one to another at our cores, and become richer for that knowledge.
In the photo above, a devotee offers prayers to the rising sun during the Chhat festival in Kathmandu, on November 20, 2012. Hindus in Nepal celebrate Chhat, a four-day festival that honors the sun god, by praying at sunrise and sunset and giving offerings to seek blessings for their families.
Click through this gallery of distant relations and acquaint yourself with the varied and universal blessings sought by and bestowed upon the family of humanity.
Photo: Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters