We human beings often act as if we are the most important creatures on this planet. However, our time on this earth has been remarkably short.

Bill Bryson says that if the whole of Earth's history were compressed into a normal 24 hour day, then human beings arrived only one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight.

The entire history of mankind would be no more than a few seconds, and one lifetime barely an instant.

We are not special. We know from genetics that every living thing is based on a single original blueprint; we are part of the great spectrum of life which has all arisen from the same source.

We are all connected – even the lowest forms of bacteria and humans have common ancestors.

We are even related to fruit, for about half the chemical functions that take place in a banana are fundamentally the same as those that take place in us.

Yet there are still some people who have difficulty in understanding that there is no real difference between different groups of modern humans.

Not only are we connected with all forms of life, but we are not unique in being intelligent. Animals have intelligence, too. Even chickens are smarter than four-year-olds while apes share almost 99 percent of their DNA with humans and are capable of compassion, communication, altruism, calculation, and consciousness.

There is no sharp line dividing us from any of the great apes; humans are a part of the animal continuum and we must respect the rest of the animal world.

Albert Einstein said that a human being is a part of the universe, limited in time and space. He experiences his thoughts and feelings as something separated from everything else.

This separation is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for just the few people nearest to us.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in all its beauty.

Carolyn Jones – Unitarian