Connection is the number one human need. We need connection more than we need food and water. This is why when people lose someone they love, they often stop eating and drinking. But the way that our society has developed over thousands of years has made connection more and more difficult to establish and more and more difficult to maintain. As a result, it is rare that we get the connection that we need from people when we are young. We cannot find a way to directly get it so we find ourselves at a cross roads; either we disconnect from other people; or try to get connection in any round about way we can. If we choose the first option, we suffer the deprivation of that loveless condition and we perpetuate the suffering created by disconnection in the world. If we choose the second option, we live every minute of our lives trying to earn people’s desire to connect with us. The list of strategies that we employ to get connection in a round about way is endless. We try to succeed and be the best so people will want to be connected to us. We put on a façade of only what we think other people want us to be so people will want to be connected to us. We manipulate people to have to stay connected with us, and the list goes on and on.
We cannot rest. We cannot be. Instead, the emptiness we feel, the emotional starvation, compels us to keep in motion. It compels us to constantly ‘do’ so as to make ourselves worthy of the connection that in fact should be ours whether we do anything or not. When none of our compulsive ‘doing’ works to get us the connection we need, we use doing as a means of escaping from that internal void that we feel. We use doing as a substitute for connection itself. But the reality is, no matter what we try to do to compensate for a lack of connection, it never works. The reality is, there never has been, isn’t and never will be a substitute for connection.
Connection is not something that you can earn. Like the air that you breathe, it is a necessity of life itself. To earn connection means the person you earned that connection from was never there for connection to begin with. It means you were a means to an end for them. It means being connected with you got them something else that they wanted. It was never about you and it was not the value of the connection itself that they were getting from you.
Genuine connection is something that occurs for the sake of connection. It is something that happens for gift of the experience of closeness. It is for the gift of the experience of seeing, hearing, feeling and understanding someone and being seen, being heard, being felt and being understood in return.
Ultimately the number one desire, the desire that hides beneath all other desires, is the desire for connection. Ultimately, what we all want is a world where we are so interconnected that we can rest in the security that we are all taking each other’s best interests as part of our own best interests. We want a world where we are not alone. We want a world where we are seen, heard, felt and understood deeply. To actualize this world that we all want, we must take the initiative to become that change we wish to see in the external world. We must be willing to be brave enough to see, hear, feel and understand ourselves. We must be willing to be brave enough to see, hear, feel and understand each other.