In one of Allen Steele’s Coyote novels, he introduces the alien religion known as Sa Tong Tas, which the humans come to translate as “thou art god.” When first I read it, it was an interesting concept for an ideal world, but I know that I do not live in an ideal world, so it just percolated in the back of my mind.

In the last few days, several real-world experiences have brought this concept to the forefront of my mind. On Thursday, riding the bus home from Boston, the woman behind me did not stop pulling on the back of my seat, except for the hour and a half she was speaking loudly on her speaker phone in a foreign language. It was only as we were arriving in New York that I realized she was not being malicious; she simply did not think about the fact that her actions affected anyone else.

Saturday morning, at the convention hotel, I went swimming. There was one woman in the pool when I got there, but she left soon after I arrived. I met her Saturday evening, and she explained that she had to get out because the water had become too rough while I was swimming. I try not to flail about or splash or make a big production of my swimming, and she said it was not my conscious fault, but I am a large person, and when swimming at my regular speed, I tend to leave a wake. In a smaller hotel pool, that wake reflects off the walls of the pool, interfering and combining to make larger waves and splashes. Sunday morning, while I was swimming by myself, I tried to be a bit more conscious of what I was doing to the surface of the water, and realized that I do tend to swim fairly smoothly, but indeed, I’m leaving a wake. There is not much I can do about this other than not swim, but now I will be more conscious of how my swimming affects others.

The reason I am writing this is because of an incident that occurred Saturday night at a party at the convention. I was talking with a writer, new to me, who is very successful. He has about two dozen books in print, and makes six figures a year from his writing. He was giving me advice and suggestions and talking about the business, which could have been extremely valuable to me. The problem, however, was that a struggling writing also joined in the conversation. It wasn’t the art of writing we were talking about; it was the business, which comes after the writing is done. The successful writer’s method was to describe a problem he’d encountered, a hurdle to overcome, a general condition that interferes with success, and then to talk about what he’d learned, how he overcame the problem, what he does to be successful. Unfortunately for me—and for the struggling writer himself—the struggling writer heard the problem, and then felt the need to interrupt to detail his own form of the problem and why it was so vitally important to solve it. If the struggling writer had realized the successful writer was offering some of the potential solutions the struggling writer was seeking, the struggling writer might have clammed up, and both he and I could have benefitted from the successful writer’s willingness to share his accumulated wisdom. Instead, by not noticing how his actions affected anyone outside himself, he deprived us both of a fantastic chance to learn to be more successful.

I’m not saying we should diminish ourselves for others’ benefits. But simply realizing that no action occurs in a vacuum, that what we do—consciously or not—affects others may cause us to think about those others, may make the world a better place (and incidentally, benefit ourselves in the long run).

N.B. — This is not directed at anyone with whom I may have had a telephone conversation during the past week.