INTERCONNECTEDNESS

(Published in the February 2000 edition of the East Bay Psychiatric Association Newsletter)


We psychiatrists encourage our patients to be more independent, to discover their “true selves,” and to follow their unique, individual course in life. This push toward being autonomous is appropriate and desirable, but have you ever thought about how little any of us really functions entirely independently?

When I get up in the morning and brush my teeth, someone else has made the toothbrush and someone else has made the toothpaste. Other people have packaged and transported these products and someone else has put them on the shelf in the store where I bought them. When I turn on the water in my sink to rinse my mouth, someone else has manufactured the plumbing fixtures, someone else has installed them, and some other people are managing the system that provides fresh and clean water for me to drink.

When I get dressed, someone else has made the clothes from raw materials that someone else has produced and gathered. When I eat my breakfast, someone else has grown the food, harvested the food, manufactured the food, packaged the food, delivered the food, and monitored the healthy quality of the food. When I drive to work, someone else has designed, manufactured, and tested the car that I bought, and other people have designed, built, and maintained the roads that I am driving on. Well, you get the point. Even the most mundane activities that we participate in minute-to-minute depend on the efforts of many other people. So how independent are we after all?

Unless you are living in the woods in a home you built by yourself from naturally occurring materials you collected on your own, and are eating natural products you yourself have grown, harvested and cooked, and have made your own clothes from fibers you have collected, you are not very independent at all. There are countless other human beings you rely on to live the convenient and comfortable life you have. Man is by nature a social being and cannot survive emotionally or physically entirely alone.

It is useful and indeed therapeutic to be mindful of this reality as a way to understand life and to be appreciative of one’s fellow man. Obtaining only the basics of food, clothing, and shelter require the complicated interplay of a myriad of people, let alone more complex tasks like building a skyscraper or a computer. In 1624 John Donne wrote: “No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." This profound insight from the early 17th century is timeless in its wisdom but not so easily kept in the forefront of one’s mind.

I have often wondered what it might feel like to be on the moon looking back at the earth as a beautiful blue orb floating in space—seeing earth from “God’s front porch,” as one astronaut put it. The writer and physician Lewis Thomas in his book “Lives of a Cell” envisioned the planet earth like a single giant cell with complex systems that keep the planet functioning normally. Thomas perceived earth as a super-organism of species, and he saw societies as super-organisms of individuals. With our planet’s health brought into question of late, it is important to remain mindful of the human interconnectedness that our world requires, because it is when man exercises his affiliative nature that life thrives and seems most worth living.