To live together, from the Latin convivere, means to live with others. We live with the people we love and learn to handle the daily difficulties that come from differences in needs, habits and routines that accompany us for much of our lives. We negotiate boundaries, talk about discomforts, agree on aspects of living together that allow everyone to be well most of the time.

And what about living with strangers? They are in the condominium, at work, at the mall, on the street, in all kinds of stores, in traffic and anywhere outside our front door.

With the people we love, however hard it may be at times, we can talk and contract, creating our own rules for living together, but in the collective we depend on each person’s common sense.

And, after all, what is common sense? According to the Michaelis dictionary (our translation), it means (a) the natural ability to judge (something, someone) in a correct and balanced way; (b) the capacity or aptitude to tell right from wrong, good from evil, true from false, in everyday and ordinary matters that do not call for deep reflection or scientific or technical solutions, thereby solving problems according to the common view.

Because each of us has acquired a specific set of values and absorbed them in our own way, each person will also interpret common sense in an individual way.

We are governed by social rules, traffic rules, rules for service at public offices, consumer rules, a body of laws and the Constitution itself, precisely to make living together easier, so that people can live side by side respecting one another’s limits. But for that, the rules have to be followed.

Every day I find myself in situations where boundaries are crossed and common sense, in my view, is not truly common sense: people rushing to cut in front of others and be first in line; sound at a volume that invades others’ space and privacy, often outside the hours set by social rules; disrespectful attitudes toward another person for the sake of individual needs; fights in traffic; individual and individualistic decision-making in contexts that involve other people, solely to take advantage and meet one’s own desires.

Whenever a decision is made looking only at one’s own navel, living together and common sense stop being considered, and collective life becomes harder and more complex. That is sad: we are collective beings and depend on this collective life to survive.

At this moment, I would like to extend an invitation: with every decision you make, every attitude or behavior, keep in mind the impact of that action and decision. Does it involve other people? Could other people be affected? Is there potential for invasion? Could I hurt someone? What can I do today to avoid invading someone else’s space? Is there a rule related to my decision? Am I going to break it?

If each of us does our part, weighing individual desire against collective limits, we can build respectful relationships with the strangers in our lives and gain life time (as a very dear friend, Maku de Almeida, says), devoting our energy to what truly matters to ourselves.