It has to be thrilling or it will eat me up, or, Connection

Yesterday I finally put a letter in the mailbox.

It’s the first letter I’ve mailed in…I don’t even know when. This particular letter has been in the making for almost a year, on and off. As I get older it seems things are measured more and more in years. Oh, it’s been a year since I spoke with that friend. Five years since I ate at that great Vietnamese restaurant at 12th and Jackson. More than 30 years since I was a first-grader, and yet I still have distinct memories of being six years old.

It makes sense. Our brains are wired to conceptualize time as a fraction of our experience, and our experience grows ever in length. For my three-and-a-half-year-old, a month is the same fraction of his life as a year is of mine; this is a commonly reported-upon perceptual phenomenon. With time our world, and worldview, grows in breadth as well. Felix’s spatial and experiential world can be rattled off in the phrases he so frequently rattles off. “Mama Dada Felix Sam Nana Papa Tega Zoffy” are his people, even though Tega and Zoffy are Nana and Papa’s cats, and Zoffy died several months ago. I recently made a list of “my people”, people I want to write a letter to, and it rapidly reached over 100—and included my younger brother, who died 15 years ago. A huge trip for Felix would be from here to Seattle to visit my sister and her family, whom he hasn’t seen since February. For me, a huge trip might be to visit the family I stayed with in the Peace Corps in South Africa and haven’t seen in over a decade.

Yet for both of us, we hunger for the meaning that comes from staying connected to the world we map out in our heads. Several years ago I read an article in Science News that was a fascinating look at this small-world connectivity. The gist of it was that the connections between people, which one might think are random, are anything but. There are nodes of “greater connectivity” at every scale one chooses to look at from the neighborhood up through the world. Every person on earth really is connected to everyone else by only a few short links, as per the title of the movie “Six degrees of separation.” When we feel connected to this network, we thrive. When we feel isolated from it, apart from it, we literally wither on the vine.

As busy-ness has taken over my life I’ve noticed a natural tendency in myself to let connections drop. This is not without its toll. I think I understand more and more what Patch Adams means when he says “it has to be thrilling, or it will eat me up.” He’s talking about connection. He’s talking about friendship.

Which is why I’m so happy to have mailed a letter. I know it’s only one letter. But it’s a start. Being able to name a challenge is the first step in overcoming it, and I hereby name this one: I want greater connectivity, friendship.

I wonder, too, if we as a species have an innate hunger for connection to our past—to our own individual lives, yes, but also our collective past as families, communities, ecosystems, to our natural and societal histories—that functions in a similar way to our drive to stay connected to and make sense of our physical world. If this is the case then our world is presented with at once an immeasurable tragedy and opportunity. The tragedy is the terrifying speed with which our natural world is being destroyed, and the speed with which the human communities that depend on that world are being altered. The opportunity is that of slowing down and connecting, re-connecting, with that world, with our friends present and past, and with ourselves. It is such connection that offers the possibility—the thrilling possibility—of creating a better future.