PEOPLE NEED PEOPLE

No one of us can go it alone even though, God knows, we think we can and maybe even try it at times, especially when we are down on ourselves and think we’re all alone. We get into that Nobody-cares-about-me-and-I-don’t-care-about-them” mood. It happens to all of us at one time or another in our lives. It isn’t pretty because there is nothing pretty about it except that we feel pretty badly at that time.

When those times occur, what we discover, but only in hindsight, is that we were and are never alone. It’s like that very, very old line when there were no bucket seats in the car and the wife says to the husband, “When we were dating, we used to snuggle up to each other as we drove and now we don’t.” And he replies, I’m not the one who moved.”

People didn’t move away from us. We moved away from them. Why? The reasons, in the end, really didn’t and don’t matter. What matters is that, when we get out of our funk, we realize that we were and are never alone. And why is that? Because we need one another. We people need people to simply exist. We cannot and were not meant to go it alone. Even when we are all alone, we are not alone.

Granted, when we are in one of those isolating moods, it is difficult for us to realize how much we need other people just to be the person who we are. Self-pity can be very overwhelming at times. Sadly, so sadly, it can take control of our lives and can lead, and does lead, to self-destruction in one way or another. What also happens is that we forget, or do not seem to realize, just how much other people need us.

Even when life is going well, which, thankfully, it is for us most of the time, we sometimes forget just how much we need one another, how important we are to one another. The old song reminds us that people who need people are the luckiest people in the world. That is true. It also means that we are all lucky whether, again, we realize it or not, which, sadly, often we do not.

If you are like me, we don’t stop often enough to reflect on how lucky, how blessed, we are to have people in our life who love and care for us as we love and care for them. We all too often take them for granted because, well, they are just there as they always have been and always will be. Lucky us! And lucky them because they have us! What a blessing and even more so where we more aware of it.

My sense is that one of the blessings of this pandemic is that we have come to realize just how much we need other people, how much other people need us, that it is no fun being isolated. My sense is that we had taken for granted how our need for other people had been fulfilled when we were not isolated. Now we know. Now we can foster those friendships and relationships even more. Now we can reflect and be thankful about how blessed we are for all those people in our lives.