131-06-05-2009
Separate and Together
By W. Owen Thornton

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Today I watched as a troop of little children were guided into the gym area by leaders.  They streamed along in pairs holding hands.  The image touched me and made me think of human kindness.  So often when we do things in our lives, we are alone … separate.  There are specific times in our lives when we need to be separate.  The one time, where I believe being separate is a good thing: where we are both kind to ourselves and to others is when we are taking risks with our careers.  Big ideas, new companies, new products all come about when someone takes a big risk.  And those times we are often frighteningly and appropriately done when we’re alone.  But more often than not we are alone or separate at many times in our lives when others could be invited along.  We are alone and separate far too often.  Most of the time, we need to be like children going to some event where we are holding hands.

Life is better when holding hands.  Even Aristotle said that we are political animals who require the presence of one another.  So, this knowledge has been ‘out there’ for over 3,000 years.  In fact, to achieve his moral code called virtue ethics, there are some character traits like generosity which cannot be lived out without the presence of others.

There is security and love in holding hands.  Holding the hand of someone who cares for you grounds you … makes life more real somehow … and it makes going through life easier when you know there’s someone standing right there beside you.  Human kindness relies on human touch.  It has been reported that human touch is vital for a happy life.

But somewhere along the line we thought we were supposed to grow up … go it alone.  Parents strive to help us become independent.  This is a good thing, but our egos take it too far.  We tend to believe we can do it all on our own, that we don’t need anyone else.  To return to Aristotle for a moment, he said we can be virtuous within a wide range of actions.  There are times to get angry and times to be meek and keep our thoughts to ourselves.  The trick to his virtue ethics is in knowing which times those are.  So, when we begin to believe that we should go life all on our own without anyone else, we have fallen outside a generous range of appropriate actions.  We fall into vice or as Aristotle would call it, we become ‘vicious’.  Or, as you have read here before, any single positive trait taken to an extreme, becomes a liability.  Human kindness requires that we hold hands and stick together for far more than we think.

In Keith Ferrazzi’s book, “Never Eat Alone,” he learned why the rich are rich.  They are rich because they know enough to ask friends for help when they get stuck.  They give away favours because they know if they do so, a favour will be given to them sometime down the road when they need it (but not in a direct ‘causal’ way but from some as yet unknown source).  This is a perfect example of human kindness.  It means casting a wide net of kindness, never knowing how or where a favour will be returned, but remaining secure in the knowledge that it will, one day be returned.

Norman Vincent Peale, in his book called the Power of Positive Thinking used the Biblical passage that should a favour not come in at a time of OUR choosing, that it was being withheld for another time, where interest would be built up and the favour to be returned would be worth even greater value.

Somewhere along the line, our human hubris has stepped in the way.  Becoming a self-made man or woman is the thing to be.  The ability to go it alone gets us street creds or bragging rights.  But few people are self made.  We’re most often, ‘group-made’.  In the church people believe that we corporately raise children in God’s way.  The problem with ‘alone’ is that one person gets the recognition while the cast and crew of that life which helped make that person’s life ‘happen’ … well they all go unknown and unrecognized.  This fools the rest of us into believing that if they can do it on their own, (which they did not) then we can do it on our own.

Human kindness is about helping one another succeed … giving people leads or tips or becoming actively invested in someone’s life or their project enough to introduce them to a friend of a friend of a friend who can really make a positive difference.  As I said in the last newsletter, little kids get purple bear paw mittens.  They also get the concept of leaning on someone when you need to (or even when you don’t but simply because you want to lean on someone) … or holding their hands.

Why we come to believe that holding hands is juvenile, I will never know.  It may be one of the greatest gifts we can give one another.  Certainly holding hands is a living demonstration of human kindness.

God Bless

Hold hands and stick together.

Owen