Mourning Our Innovators

I've been thinking a lot about why so many of us have been affected by Steve Jobs' death. I had a moment of real sadness and shock when I saw the headline, and Facebook lit up that day with people's reactions to his death. Of course any death is sad, but why are we--who didn't know him--so sad?

I can tell you the answer doesn't have to do with how much we like our ipods. Or not exactly, anyway. My sense is that one reason we mourn people like Steve Jobs so deeply is that we are aware of how special he was; we know he was an innovator, a creator, on a scale that we don't see just every day. Just like Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan creator of the Greenbelt movement who also died recently, Steve Jobs was a rare human being.

And somehow, there is something human about us that instinctively recognizes that rarity, that celebrates their place as part of humanity--as giving to humanity in a particular way. Paradoxically, their celebrity in this case is really about our connection to them as fellow human beings, ones that we know have particularly contributed to our humanness writ large.