Staying apart and out of circulation has not been easy. It’s been a double dose of difficulty.
On the one hand, separated as we are, it has been hard to relate to that “we’re all in this together” thing. Getting together physically would help with a feeling of solidarity.
On the other hand, we have all been sharing One Same Thing: disrupted lives.
Those comfortable routines and the people who populated them we now notice in a new way. We’ve lost them.
Having lost them, the Human Family we are part of is being sorely tested right now--likely never to be the same. The new normal really will be NEW.
So, what do you and I want the Human Family to look like when we get past this Great Uncertainty?
I have a doctor friend in Massachusetts whose life points to some answers.
At age 86, he still enjoys hiking and cross-country skiing. The third of December, 2019 found him on a trail near Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.
It was late afternoon, and he thought he was alone in the woods, but as he crossed the ridge ahead of him, he caught sight of another skier.
As he tells it, “It startles me because I’m sure it’s my wife Nancy—the blue ski clothes, the white and blue hat, the skiing form. We meet one another on the trail, each step[ping] aside so as to allow [the other] to pass. The woman says, ‘Nice snow for skiing.’” Ordinary small talk ensued, but then, unable to contain himself, he told her about his “vision” and added, “My wife died 3 years ago and we both loved to ski”--after a bit more polite conversation, the woman said, “‘My husband died 2 years ago!’”
They talked on for a good 20 minutes: swapping stories of their spouses, their children and grandchildren, their love of skiing, their common loss and aloneness and their “thanksgiving for all that is here around us,” as he put it. Further on in his Christmas letter, he reflected, “There is something transcendent about this encounter.”
I agree.
My friend, in that brief encounter, had transcended his own family.
For a few moments his and the stranger’s families were joined--in the Human Family.
My friend is a person who models for us how to be a member of the Human Family: open to conversation with a stranger; unafraid to share his deepest feelings; unafraid to hear hers; seeing their common humanity; and being thankful for the day they have.
Here is a person we can emulate, one who has, as John Meacham puts it, “a habit of mind and of heart that tends toward love and order rather than selfishness and disorder.”
In this Great Uncertainty that has forced us apart, each one of us can cultivate such a habit of mind and heart--and join or rejoin or reinvigorate the Human Family.
Dick Conville is a retired college professor and long-time resident of Hattiesburg.
