We are social beings. We all need each other. Aristotle said so.
His notion of Zoon Politikon claims that we, the Human species, are by nature social, relational animals who realize our fullest existence within a community. This polis or community provides a space that allows us to flourish in human capacity. In contrast, its opposite: an isolated space, a private realm of survival, is full of lonely individuals with dissipating potential and futile contentment.
My mom used to quote to us kids (there's 7 of us) this one John Donne quote, all in an effort to help us get outside ourselves. And apparently it's stuck with me this long so...well done Madre. This 17th c. poet and clergy man wrote:
“No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
We all experience life side by side. We all go through this place together, this place that is so jointly lovely and so tiresome, so exquisite and so dreadful, so edifying and at times, so harrowing.
And yet despite this grand, collective encounter with life, despite our being part of a social species,
we, so many of us, often go at life all alone.
Be it our staunch independence or our pride or our fear, it's probable we are living day to day detached in a solitary sphere of exclusion. We sometimes fail to see all the heads bobbing in the ocean all around us, doing exactly what we are doing, just staying afloat.
I recently finished reading the American classic, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, written by Carson McCullers. It is a book completely beautiful and sad and disappointing. And the characters are so lonely, so morally isolated and it seems all they desire is to be heard, to be understood. For somebody to just get them.
And their hearts are beating with passion. Beating for music, for friendship, for civil brotherhood, for freedom. But because these characters sense their hearts’ beat entirely alone, their pulsing passion for life fades.
Perhaps it is Miss McCullers wise, moral setting voice, heard through her character Doctor Copeland, (the ‘Negro doctor’) as he warns,
“My advice to you is this. Do not attempt to stand alone…the most fatal thing a man can do is stand alone.”
We are a society plagued by isolation. And with technology ever increasing our social engagement is ever decreasing. Depression, anxiety, fear, paranoia, suicide, all emanate from our proliferating loneliness. And the more insular we become, the more decrepit a people, a nation, a planet we become. No man is an island, and if we pretend we can make it through all of this as such, the callous and cold quiet will cause us to wither and atrophy into lightlessness. Only the warmth of association, of communion can keep all of us going.
I was recently inspired by a brother-in-law of mine/ high school football coach, who while speaking in front of a large audience hearkened to the Supreme call to "Feed my sheep" with great emotional urgency (NT, John 21:17.) He encouraged us to, “C’mon lets all of us together, grab one another and make it through this place together, no one left behind. We can make it only if we do it together.” In that moment I felt a humble power and solid strength from and for all who surrounded me; like all would be fine, as long as we linked limbs and made our way together.
By embracing vulnerability, by honoring weakness, by cultivating the strengths in ourselves and especially others, this is how we walk in oneness. It is seeing us all as human, with a garden of magnificent variances that aid in the mass whole of mankind. It is being less of a skeptic and a parochial cynic, and becoming more an observer of light and goodness in all our associations, this is what promotes life. When we open our eyes, our arms, our hearts, when we see and feel and feed others, it is inevitable that our own space, our own sphere will amass into a brightness communaly abundant, and full of imperishable warmth.
““If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.””
(Photo by Daniel Naudé: Regina Nelani. Barkly East, Eastern Cape, 27 July 2010)