***The territorial programming in many human minds makes for some strangely dysfunctional behavior at times.. We will completely ignore each other on trains and streets, but will happily connect and even give money to each other if we know we are in the same club with shared interests - despite knowing little about each other!***

![unity](http://touchbroward.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/unity-in-the-community-featimg1-828x450.jpg)

On any given day, if I walk down a busy city street I will see hundreds or thousands of people - most of whom I do not know anything much about and may never see again. The scale of this is mind boggling at times and among those many people are a range of different mindsets, beliefs and intentions. Some of us aim to be open to helping even the most uncaring people, if it means they survive to live and learn another day - while some of us are on the other end of the spectrum and may never help anyone unless doing so helps us. Somewhere in that spread of possibilities, lies the idea of 'service to all'.

### Service to All

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You may have heard of the ideas of 'Service to self' and 'Service to others' - with some people claiming that humanity's evolution requires us to become oriented to 'Service to others' and that 'Service to self' is destructive. This though, is based on false logic since we cannot meet all of our own needs unless we are to some extent oriented to serve self. Equally, we cannot fully serve anyone else unless we are having our own needs met. It is illogical to conclude that for some reason our needs must be met by others - it literally means that we must all wipe each other's backsides because wiping our own is 'bad'. I'm sure you can see how nonsensical this approach is and yet many self proclaimed 'spiritual teachers' have said this and continue to say this while having large followings even today.

Service to ALL means a balance that feels right for all involved and where all actions are considered such that they do no harm to anyone and are aimed at maybe helping many, but at least self. 

### Service to Steem?

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One of the great things about Steemit is that we can simultaneously help ourselves and each other almost effortlessly, just by being who we are, learning, sharing and evolving together. The closest we have here to a pressure to gain approval from 'bosses' is that of gaining votes from whales and other big wallet users - but that is not essential and if we are truly helping people here then we will get upvoted and noticed anyway, it may just take longer to see the benefits of that if whales are not involved.

We don't need to all share the same thoughts and agenda to help each other, but it does help if we all have a shared love and respect for each other as 'Steemians' who are working together to create something new and powerful for human life. So what is it to truly serve 'Steem' and thus also serve all Steemians?

For me, anything that empowers the people that use this site to improve their creativity, their quality of life and their understanding of themselves and life itself is going to help both them and us all in some way - so this is why I focus so much on finding and sharing things and ideas that are empowering or that solve a problem of disempowerment.

Is it empowering to only speak to small groups of people in the Steem community? Or is it more empowering to communicate with a wide variety of people? This is another of Steemit's strengths, in that all posts can be seen across the whole network, meaning that we are free to stumble into those who otherwise we would never encounter on the closed system model of Facebook and other sites. 

So if there is something in particular that unifies us and that brings us together, it might be a shared intention to look after our own needs and in the context of Steemit, that means connecting with others and to some extent looking after each other's needs too. By remaining open to learning more about Steemit and each other, we optimise our ability to thrive and grow both our presence here and also the platform itself in the wider world. Maybe one day there won't really be any 'strangers' on that street - there'll just be others who we can easily know something about just as we can do by looking at their profiles on Steemit! For some that might be a frightening prospect, but once fear is cleared from our perception, it can actually be a heart warming prospect too - loneliness might be a thing of the past!

Wishing you well,
Ura Soul

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