WE NEED CONNECTION with other people in order to pass through our years in relative health and happiness, to heal from the many wounds of a lived life, to find meaning in our days.

THE GOALS THAT ORIENT our futures are usually, at heart, about being connected with others. So much of human hope is shaped by the need to love, to be loved, to offer our particular talents and skills as gifts to humanity at large. And as the years we’ve lived begin to outnumber those we can imagine ahead and we look back upon the life we have crossed, we tend to measure the meaning of our experience in terms of what we have given and what we have shared with others. Often we are left little moved by that which we have taken for ourselves.

IT IS MOMENTS OF CONNECTION that instill humor and heroics into our days and lives, moments when joy and creativity spill out from ourselves into the world, when we are able to be calm and confident in our belonging, as the person we are, to the swirling humanity that surrounds us. Even comfortable moments of solitude are aided by the sense that we belong to particular others, however far away they may be.