The Other Way to Unity

One childhood day when I was playing tag with my sister, while she was chasing me, I ran into a wall. It really hurt. I walked the long way around the house to the front door, which my mother opened. Alarmed by the gash she saw in my forehead, she took me to the hospital for my first stitches. 

When we get hurt, we often first experience it alone. We’ve all had those moments. If we’re lucky, we don’t have to wait too long until we can lean on someone else in the midst of that pain. 

On September 11, 2001, every American experienced that terrible hurt together. It united us—at least for a while. But after a time, that sense of unity faded, replaced with the new normal of life as usual plus longer lines at the airport. 

Was the surge of patriotic unity after 9/11 merely an evolutionary reflex instinct, to herd together for protection and consolation in the face of danger and in response to hurt? Must we naturally revert to living a post-hurt life mostly disconnected, or is it possible to live with the same unity once the pain and trauma have been assuaged?

A wise man once wrote:

If we live our state only as our own, our soul is impoverished, and in the end becomes barren, and life becomes meaningless and unbearably wearisome. Our task is to become universal persons, to bear in ourselves all the cosmos, to live in our life all the depth of the world’s history, and above all of man…Each and every suffering, each and every joy, every experience, be it of love, enmity, joy, melancholy, hope, despair; everything we go through, whether riches, poverty, hunger, satiety, fear, power, violence, humility, fighting, non-resistance, and all the rest, appear to us as revelations of what is happening in the world…

If he’s right, we don’t need tragedy to experience the deep unity we felt in the fall of 2001. But we do have to make a choice: either to live our condition of life as if it were only our own, or to use the gift of every life experience as a means to connect with others. 

Tomorrow is September 12. What will you choose? And how will you choose to connect?