I am one with all the peoples of this world.

In a transit queue at six in the morning, several hundred people are worrying about roughly nine things. A connection. A parent's health. Whether the message they sent last night was too sharp.

Oneness is a large claim resting on a small observation: the interior of other people is far less exotic than the outside suggests. Different languages, near-identical anxieties.

You do not have to feel it mystically for it to be useful. It is enough to assume, when somebody is being difficult across a counter or a border, that their nine things are running in the background too.