INTERCONNECTEDNESS: FACING REALITY
When There Is No Place Called Home
Ours is a culture obsessed with the pursuit of happiness. As a consequence of this, we are more lonely, estranged, and lost than at any other time on this planet. The 32,000-year-old cave paintings and Paleolithic sites of paintings, pictographs, and petroglyphs all have handprints on the walls. Handprints, one on top of another, stamped there over tens of thousands of years, images from another time of togetherness.
How do we indicate we’re together? Number of followers. Number of likes on a post. Being friended. A long Snapchat streak.16 Nearly at the speed of light, we can tell our popularity. Some are entertained by these counts; others watch them obsessively and manipulate them so that, for a brief moment, they appear as the most popular. I got a glimpse of this well-developed craft when I was coached on how to promote a book using social media. I declined. Google and many businesses now offer tools for getting known and being most popular.
Popularity is not the same as feeling you belong. How sad if there’s any confusion about this.
Two phrases I love that can never be used to describe cyberspace: “the dear neighbor” and “beloved community.” How many remember what they mean? How many have never experienced such intimacy and connection, so the terms are poetic but meaningless?
In 2016, the furniture company IKEA did a survey among people aged 18– 29 to learn what they felt about the concept of “home.” Only 20 percent felt that home was an actual physical space; only 37 percent felt “at home” in their physical residences. The rest defined home as where they had their significant relationships. (Is that cafés, bars, gyms, concerts?)
A full quarter of the survey’s respondents said it was more important to have decent wi-fi “than to have social spaces in the home.”17 Not only do relationships zoom around the Web ungrounded, but younger people feel no need to create a physical place of their own where they can occur.
What happens when humans have no sense of place to call home? What happens when we no longer feel connected to others? The answers to these questions are found in the increasing suicide rates among youth, military veterans, farmers, indigenous peoples, and the elderly. Anywhere there is disconnection, there is suicide. As the isolation increases, so do suicide rates. These tragic statistics tell us that humans need to feel we belong. We need to be grounded in community.
We exist in a bundle of life. We say, “A person is a person through other people.”
It is not “I think therefore I am” [but rather] I am human because
I belong. I participate, I share.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
One time in Australia, when I was working in an Aboriginal community, I witnessed the strength that people gain when being on their ancestral ground. In town, in barren, bleak concrete buildings, people went about their work and nothing seemed amiss. But later in the day, having finished our meetings, we drove out to their original land, what they simply call “country.” No pronouns, no adjectives—just “country.” (When I Googled this to check my memory, I was taken to music sites.) My Aboriginal colleagues were transformed, filled with energy and humor. We had a great time, sitting together on the beach, hearing stories about fishing, feasts, and ocean storms.
It seemed clear that they were drawing energy from deep roots, tens of thousands of years that the land has held them in communion, no separation between Earth and human. This is how Aboriginal Australians describe their relationship to place, as an inseparable whole. As much as I have tried to understand what I witnessed, I know I never can. I was raised in a culture that makes a clear distinction between person and place. I was eager to leave home to be free to wander and work wherever I chose. Now I realize that such freedom comes at a price: I can never comprehend what it feels like to live as a settled community in trusted communion with the Earth.
When people with no ground or identity funnel their despair into violence and suicide, governments blame the victims and exert further police control. Predictably, social problems intensify; no one cares that these are legitimate responses to losing the strength of their ancestral lands.18
The same dynamic is playing out today in global culture, even if there’s been no cultural tradition of place. Humans need to feel they belong. This is a real need that can never be satisfied virtually. Young people feel lost. What they find on the Internet—momentary friends, fans, pornography, empty entertainment, and extreme sensory stimulation—can never replace the sense of belonging that comes from living together in physical reality, participating together in all the dilemmas, dramas, and delights in the web of life.
A native community in the Northwest of Canada became well-known for putting an end to teen suicides after an epidemic of them. The solution became visible with this incident: A young man was standing on a bridge, about to throw himself into the river (ironically named the River of Life). While he stood there, perhaps hesitating, a car drove by and someone waved to him. That simple gesture stopped him. The community learned from his experience and thereafter focused efforts on how to create a culture of welcome and belonging. Teen suicides ceased.
One of our cultural identities or myths is of the one who goes it alone and pulls herself up by her bootstraps—the rebel, the outlaw, the self-made person.
What a lie. What an ingratitude. What a danger. We are each the recipient of innumerable currents of life—through the lives of others—streaming into and influencing our own lives.
Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Zen priest