With terrorists bringing down airplanes, earthquakes bringing down cities, and revolutions bringing down governments, what will fall next is anyone's guess. Half the world is starving, the other half can't stop eating, and the liquids we need like water and oil are getting harder to find. Many are losing their jobs and their homes and their faith in the whole idea of money and markets, and the cult of the dollar is becoming increasingly specious. Scientists in Switzerland are trying to replicate the Big Bang in a tunnel, others are cloning life and engineering genetics, doomsday prophets are preaching apocalypse, new age mystics await universal awakening, there's buzz about imminent tech to turn air into energy, and the Mayan calendar's about to run out, just as our planet passes through the center of the galaxy for the first time in 12,000 years, which might make the north and south poles flip and change places, uncoupling the crust of the earth from its core. Politicians, economists, and corporate tycoons are desperately trying to prop up a worldview that is broken and quickly collapsing, telling people that everything's fine and things are getting back to normal. But normality no longer applies.

Yet through all this, we get up in the morning, we have a cup of coffee, we eat a bowl of cereal, and we live another day. We go on dates, cook dinner, get haircuts, buy new socks, and think about what to do in the summertime, or what to give Mom on her birthday. No matter how dramatic the backdrop, still we get on with our everyday lives, which don't feel epic at all.

It is this range of experience — from the scientists trying to play God, to the leaders trying to play wise, to the children trying to play house — that defines what it's like to be living right now: to be fluent in the crazy complexity of our interconnected global reality, and still to come home at night and be a good Dad.

Shifting perspective between these two scales and still maintaining our common humanity is what it's all about.

Because in all of the craziness, our common humanity is what we are finally starting to see.