Aoife Henry

Edgar D. Mitchell was an astronaut on the Apollo XIV mission. In the documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon (2007), he spoke of the fleeting sense of connection he experienced with the cosmic dust that surrounded their spacecraft:

The biggest joy was on the way home. In my cockpit window, every two minutes: The Earth, the Moon, the Sun, and the whole 360-degree panorama of the heavens. And that was a powerful, overwhelming experience. And suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of the spacecraft, the molecules in the body of my partners, were prototyped, manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. And that was an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness; it wasn’t ‘Them and Us’, it was ‘That’s me!’, that’s all of it, it’s… it’s one thing. And it was accompanied by an ecstacy, a sense of ‘Oh my God, wow, yes’, an insight, an epiphany. 

There will surely be people who disagree with the following statement, but assume with me, for the purposes of this discussion on connection and its absence, that cosmic dust is not sentient. Our astronaut comrade felt connection with dust. I introduce with this story because it represents an example of how attaining a sense of connection is more nuanced than being in the company of other sentient beings.

Considering how deprived many people are of connection, it makes sense that it is not a trivial target to aim for:

“We’re Increasingly Disconnected and That Has Consequences”

WebMD

“Loneliness is a problem of epidemic proportion.”

Psychology Today

“An illness of isolation, a disease of disconnection: Depression and the erosion of we-experiences”

Frontiers in Psychology

Disconnection, or loneliness, is a poltergeist problem. Like a poltergeist, we see its insidious consequences, but we can’t catch it or even define it clearly enough to come up with a clear-cut solution. Such a solution doesn’t exist. People can be lonely in a crowd, or feel disconnected when they regularly spend time with people who love them. My understanding of disconnection is that of an uncertain longing. Unlike hunger or sexual desire, which are needs driven by a specific focus, disconnection reflects a persistent but directionless unmet need. Furthermore, each individual’s need for connection is a hazy function of their personality type, their history and their current emotional and mental state. Disconnection is hard to define and therefore hard to resolve.

But not impossible? I hope not. Is it possible to pacify the poltergeist without catching it?

In Toni Morrison’s novel, Songs of Solomon, she writes of the character Pilate Dead’s deliberations on how to live the following:

” … she tackled the problem of trying to decide how she wanted to live and what was valuable to her. When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference?”

Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

I wonder, in our quest to alleviate chronic disconnection, if we could bypass the task of strictly defining it by questioning ourselves as Pilate did: pointing to times when we have felt connected, and times when we have felt disconnected, and learning to tell the difference.

For example, some of the things that spawn a feeling of connectedness for me are:

• Suffering with someone – running hard, empathizing with someone’s pain or having them empathize with mine

• Celebrating with someone: my win or theirs

• Singing or playing music with someone (even if that someone be a pre-recorded voice delivered to my eardrums by a the good people at Spotify)

• Improvisational comedy with someone and the laughing that complements it (or just laughing at a memory that has come to surface or with pre-recorded comedians doing a bit)

• Physical closeness with someone: feeling the warmth of skin or fur and the pressure of contact

• Paying attention to the details of things: the veins of a leaf, the layers of a rock, the stitching in clothing, the bass line or drum beat in a song, the tensions in someone’s face that contract or release when you touch them, the feeling of headphone earpads on your cheek, the withheld sweetness when you hold a piece of fruit in your mouth without puncturing it

• Rituals: the routines of your day you can always return to – running in the morning, a cold shower, cleansing/moisturizing your skin, gratitude journaling etc.

Conversely, some of the things that cause me to feel disconnected are:

• Frantic and/or undirected screen-use to avoid uncomfortable feelings, such as boredom, shame, loneliness (ironically), pain

• Trying (and failing) to pay attention to 2+ entities at once (in particular, a screen and a speaker or a fellow interlocutor, or a screen and a book, or a screen while running)

I certainly see patterns in the practices that make me feel connected, but I wouldn’t dream of projecting my experiences onto you, dear reader. 

Instead, I challenge you to take a leaf out of Pilate Dead’s book, and ask yourself: when do you feel connected and when do you feel disconnected and what is the difference?

Thank you A, for the inspiration for this post.