If a Tree Falls in the Forest...

Vinalhaven sunrise

Source: Avrum Weiss

There is no I without a thou. —Martin Buber

I live on an island 12 miles off of the Maine coast. It is a place of striking natural beauty and there often moments on my morning walk that literally take my breath away. When I see a spectacular sunrise, or a bald eagle flying overhead, I find myself rehearsing how I will describe it to my wife when I get home. I don’t plan to do that, it just happens that way.

I was self-critical initially, asking myself “Are you really that incapable of just being in the moment, giving your full attention to what is going on right now that you have to rehearse how you are going to talk to your wife about it?” After a few days of obligatory self-flagellation, I came up with another explanation. I think I rehearsed how I would describe it to my wife because the experience was not complete for me until I shared it with someone else.

It is only through intimate relationships that we become most fully ourselves. Each relationship elicits a different aspect of who we potentially are. It’s not just that we act and feel differently in the contexts of different relationships, it is that we literally are different people in each relationship.

The self is created in the process of engaging in intimate relationships with others. When a child is born, if someone picks that child up, gazes at them adoringly, and holds them closely, that child understands herself as lovable in that moment and becomes lovable. She has no other frame of reference; she could not at that moment be anything else. If, however, that same child when born is abandoned in a trash bin, that child not only will experience herself as unlovable but will actually be unlovable. Again, she could not at that moment be anything else.

On my morning walks, I often run into a neighbor and stop to chat for a few minutes. We don’t talk about anything deeply personal, mostly just the weather (it is Maine in the winter after all!), or politics. I’ve been shocked to notice how much those conversations lift my mood and brighten my entire outlook on the day. I’ve come to understand how much I have relied on these simple everyday conversations before COVID, and how much the isolation of the pandemic has depleted my vitality. I understand now the importance of the brief chats I had every day with my colleagues in the break room, or the owner of the dry cleaners who read my book in Korean, or the cashier at the lunch place I ate every week who knows me and asks how I’m doing. Unfortunately, it’s only when these relationships were taken away that I came to understand how important they had been.

I assume that I am not alone in this, and that others of you are making similar discoveries about your lives. I think we’ve all done a wonderful job finding creative ways to stay connected to the people who matter most to us, finding ways to gather together for joyous events like birthdays and weddings and sad event like memorials or saying goodbye to loved ones. I think a lot of us may have overlooked some of the other more casual everyday relationships that buoyed our lives, and whose absence has left us depleted, fatigued, and despairing. I wonder how much of what has been called “COVID fatigue” is attributable to the loss of these everyday relationships.

What can we do? The problem is that it is hard to have spontaneous interactions with people when you are stuck in your home, so I think we have to get outside as often as we possibly can. We have to get outside, wearing a mask and socially distancing, and go places where there are other people (who are also wearing masks and socially distancing). We need to get outside every day if at all possible, in good weather and bad (you won’t melt in the rain, as my mother often reminded us). Get outside when we feel like it, and get outside when we don’t feel like it, maybe especially when we don’t feel like it. As we have learned to say about many parts of our lives during this awful pandemic, it’s not the same, but it’s a hell of a lot better than nothing.

Stay safe.