Connections
“I love
the connections that make this big old world feel like a little
village.”
Gina
Bellman
As someone who spent
ninety percent of her first two years in a hospital with asthma, I
have to be conscientious about staying connected with other people. A
psychiatrist friend, on hearing this small piece of my personal
history, said, “But you don't have attachment disorder!” The jury
is still out on that. What I have is the ability to spend long
stretches of time alone without a lot of discomfort. I have to tend
to my human connections in ways that other people do not, otherwise I
become isolated.
As a child, I lived in a
small town in North Carolina. There, people dropped by whenever they
felt like it. It was not unusual to sit down to lunch or dinner with
several people other than the immediate family at the table. I can
hear my daddy saying, “Pull up a chair, son. Have some supper.”
It was usually men who came—he sponsored many who were trying to
give up drinking liquor and put their lives back together. I never
had to think about tending to connections then—my daddy was a human
magnet.
Nowadays, this sort of
village mentality would be helpful. Maybe it still exists in small
town America, but in cities, we make “plans.” We keep a careful
calendar. We see folks only when it is “convenient.” I understand
this—people are busy. But people have always been busy. It never
before prevented them from reaching out to friends and family. It
seems we've replaced the whole idea of face-to-face human contact
with texting. It's rare to even spontaneously phone someone, since we
might interrupt something they are doing that's more important. We
seem to have forgotten how to be intimate with one another in
spontaneous ways.
Barbara Bush advised;
“Cherish your human connections—your relationships with friends
and family.” I believe in our embrace of technology, we've become
better friends with our phones than with most human beings. It may be
more convenient but it does not feed the heart and soul. I hope today
you'll do what Diana Ross recommended: “Reach out and touch
somebody's hand; make this a better world if you can.”
In the Spirit,
Jane
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