Last week I met with a friend on Zoom. The caller said that she didn’t have anything in particular to talk about, but that she just wanted to keep the connection between us. I applauded her. Connection, you might say, is everything.

But you know as well as I do: these days we’ve got connection all wrong. With phones, email, texting, DMs; meeting apps instead of meetings; patient portals instead of doctor’s offices; social media instead of social, well, anything. With instant online shopping and banking; remote working and remote schooling, and so on, and so on. We can’t even list all the ways we have co-opted and confused real-life human connection. Even a connection on Zoom isn’t a connection, although it’s often the only connection we have.

When my friend and I were talking I remembered a line that someone famous had once said, a screaming, crying, urgent exhortation to remedy modern life: “Only connect!” Was it Buddha? Jesus? Oprah? I looked it up.

It wasn’t so modern. It wasn’t so holy. It was the author E. M. Forster in his 1910 novel Howard’s End.

“Only connect! Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.”

He was writing about relationships, and the social strictures that keep people distanced. That breed fear and loneliness, that stifle communication and kindness. For all our snazzy inventions, for all our lofty intentions, and against our basic need to meet, gather, herd, commingle, and yes, connect, we have only succeeded in driving each other further apart.

But rarely, I get a glimpse. I get a glimpse when I see a delivery person walking up to my door. Up to my door! And the knock. Will I open it, or will I pretend I’m not home? Will I say hello? Will I say thank you?

I get a glimpse when I’m in a room with other people. It may be a big room, or a small one, no bigger than my front porch. It may be a quiet room, or it may be a noisy room. It may be with people I know, but more often with people I don’t. It’s not likely to be people who think like me; more often it’s probably not. There may be talking, there may be singing, there may be silence, there may be stillness, there may be dance. I feel it in a theatre, I feel it in a stadium, I feel it in a grocery line. It’s in a meditation hall or church, in a hospital waiting room, at the post office, and with total strangers in the airport shuttle. It’s on my street. It’s on your street.

It’s the people, the people, the people! And the invisible, unknowable essence that flows between us, that unites us and defines us, not as separate, but as whole. That’s our beauty! That’s our power! That’s the height of our existence, revealed when we only connect.

I’m hopeful. I’m much more hopeful.

Photo by Keith Luke on Unsplash