8/27/2011 8:12

Living Connected

Yesterday I biked to Seymour, all by myself, had lunch and then returned, still by myself. This is a pretty normal sort of thing for me to do, biking alone on the back roads, seeing few people, meeting no one that I know.

My thought this morning is how connected I was on my trip.
• Leaving the city, I pass by the house of a friend I know from my days of being an employee, which is what he was doing then.
• Then I cross the road I take when I visit the house of another friend from the same environment.
• As I pass the golf course and head into the countryside, I cross another road which leads to someone I know from church.
• At the county line, the gull garden at the prison camp reminds me of someone I know who once resided there.
• Approaching Seymour, I think about a student at West High who was expecting to move to Seymour this summer.
• Heading south toward the highway, I can see the apartment where I used to visit another friend when she lived in Seymour.
• The restaurant reminds me of my aunt and uncle, who often ate there while they were alive and living in Black Creek.
• On the way home, I see the tops of thunderheads which I guess to be heading into Escanaba, reminding me of the students and colleagues I knew when I taught there.
• And somewhere along the road a stranger in a motor vehicle passes me, heading in the opposite direction, and waves.

About half of the relationships that I noticed on this trip are centered in the past; others are ongoing; one is purely transient. I'm not sure that friendships with people who have moved away are necessarily less valuable to me than current ones. Certainly past connections to my heritage are still relevant in the reality of daily life. Even the passing greeting of a stranger on a town road ties my life to theirs and links us both into humanity.

There are times when I feel a dearth of strong interpersonal ties, but riding alone to Seymour was not such an occasion.

On my desk is an article from the January 14th, 2011, issue of Science titled "Why Loneliness Is Hazardous to Your Health". That's a topic of some concern to me, especially as I get older, but the article contains some interesting observations. John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago says, "Loneliness isn't at all what people thought it was". Daniel Russell of Iowa State University at Ames says, "Some people are socially isolated and they're not lonely. By contrast, some people are lonely even if they have a lot of social contacts."

How is loneliness hazardous to your health? The article says, "It's as if loneliness prepares the body for some looming threat ... by keeping the body in alert mode." I guess that would be like riding your bicycle on busy county highways all the time instead of along the lonely back roads. Especially if while riding the back roads you think about all the people with whom you remain somehow connected.

The problem for most of us is not being connected with others. In actual reality it is hard to live in modern western culture without being connected to other people. Rather, the challenge lies in being aware of how connected we are, and perhaps in being aware of how valuable are those connections even when they don't meet some Utopian ideal of connectedness.