I think we only really need two commandments:

“Help as many people as much of the time as possible.”

and

“Hurt as few people as little of the time as possible.”

As far as I can tell pretty much everything we ever have to decide fits into these two rules.

The fact is that we cannot go through life without hurting other people. Even something as simple as getting a job or a place in a good school means that someone else did not get it. Any competition will have winners and losers. If we won, someone else lost. Fundamentally that means we are directly accountable for any upset that loss causes them. Therefore it is impossible to go through life without negatively affecting anyone.

Yet we can control how many people we actively hurt and how much we hurt them, by managing our behaviour and being aware of how our actions and behaviour affect other people. (And yes, this is even more difficult in a different culture, such as an American living in England. I’ve been here most of my life – 23 years to be precise – and yet I still run into idiosyncrasies that remind me how different the two cultures are, some of which still have the ability to sting…more on that later!)

This is a constant learning curve but that’s what keeps life interesting! 😉

Til next time, this is Em signing off,

mE