I’ve recently started reading a charming book called ‘Bhutan to Blacktown’, about Om Dhungel, a man forced to flee ethnic cleansing in Bhutan and rebuild his life in Australia. It’s a story about migration, about someone who lost everything and created a new life, and it’s full of understated wisdom such as this: “we should see ourselves as neither dependent nor independent, but interdependent.”
With those words Om Dhungel and his co-author James Button captured something that’s been on my mind lately. We are kidding ourselves when we think we are wholly responsible for our successes, or, for that matter, wholly to blame for our failures. Everything good in this world is created by people who recognise their individual power but also understand that to achieve anything worthwhile we have to stand on the shoulders of others.
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