You Are Definitely Not Alone!

We fight for it throughout our adolescence.
We revere the characteristic in our favourite films.

We even sing songs about it, fight wars over it, and enshrine it in our laws and constitutions.

Independence.

it brings out the warrior in us.
And yet…
Independence is not where we taste the heights and depths of true happiness.

Because the independence yearned for in adolescence has to make way for emotional maturity.
(Although we observe plenty of evidence that there are many who aren’t that bothered about that journey.)

Eventually, particularly as society layers itself with complexity…
We wake up to the fact that we’re not independent at all.

We need each other.
We don’t want to be alone…
well, not when we don’t choose to be.

i remember the line in the film ‘Shadowlands’…
The heart-rending story of C S Lewis’s relationship with poet Joy Davidman.

Whistler, an Oxford student, says to Professor Lewis “My father taught me: “We read to know that we’re not alone””

indeed, we do a lot of things to know that we’re not alone.
This latest pandemic exploded with creative ways of each person ensuring that they weren’t truly isolated.

Technology helped, of course.
Bringing us a-clapping and a-yelling together to praise our national heroes…
Dropping hand-made cards through the letterbox of all our neighbours…
Singing arias from bedroom windows…
Creating dispersed choirs…
And the masses and oodles of astonishing entertainment that we’ve all created on- and off-line.

Anything to reach out and touch each other.

Yet, in spite of those wonders, it’s inevitable that we’d become jaded with the novelty and courage of it all.
The selflessness of it all.

Because, sadly, shifting back to ‘Old Familiar Ways’ seems to be connected to our yearning to be together again.
To touch each other.
To remember that we simply cannot function without each other.

There are many things that I will hold onto.
For I have witnessed humanity at its best, when confronted with a silent enemy.

And – in spite of many achingly-sad signs to the contrary – this is my prayer…

That I will hold tightly to the beauty in my life that has come about….
when your joy and your well-being become the increasing focus of my attention.