Page 41 - Retail Pharmacy Assistants - November 2020

Yep, we start out alone. We die alone. And we spend the time in between trying to reconnect to this memory of the miraculous oneness from whence we came. I like this. For me, this memory of the miraculous is a knowingness that life is big and meaningful and precious and that everything is awesomely, unfathomably, satiatingly connected. We share 60 per cent of our DNA with a banana. The first living cell emerged four billion years ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. We are literally breathing molecules right now inhaled by Buddha, Marie Curie and Beyoncé. We die and decompose and replace ourselves – every cell – every seven years. We are the Earth. We are space. Our fates are inseparable. You pull the cuticle on my little finger, and you can move my entire lumpen frame. The spiritualists teach us this, but we know it viscerally, too. It’s miraculous and true. And yet we’re not living it. So, what are we lonely from? For most, it really isn’t from more connections with humans, per se. No, we’re lonely from meaningful connection to each other. And to life. I learned recently that 22 per cent of millennial men in the US with less than a bachelor’s degree reported not working at all in the previous year. Why? The study put it down to video games. But, wait! It’s not that these young men couldn’t find work so figured they might as well game to kill time. Nope. The study found they were not working because they’re gaming – gaming provided more meaning and connection for these young men than the disenfranchised entry-level jobs available to them. I found my heart opening when I viewed the ‘problem’ through this lens. 11. We’re also lonely from ourselves. Those people in Japan who rent cars to sit in them on their own (where they knit, write or just close their eyes and be with their thoughts) are finding a way to reconnect (at least more peacefully) with themselves. I had an agent when I was working in TV who faked business trips to sit in her aloneness. She’d book a motel room down the road and order room service and sometimes just sit in the bath and cry. It’s a gorgeous oddity of our existence – our loneliness is not caused by being on our own. Indeed, loneliness is best cured with aloneness, which is to say, a meaningful connection to ourselves. All of which presents a veritable triple-pike paradox, the full glory of which played out during the coronavirus lockdown, right? We were all forced into isolation, which for multi- person households stripped its members of alone time, leaving many lonely for a meaningful relationship with themselves, for ‘a room of one’s own’. While for the 20–60 per cent of us living solo in the western world, who’d had to do lockdown with no human contact, their connection with their communities was severed, forcing us into a particularly biologically grim, catch-22–like loneliness. You see, in times of crisis the human species is genetically programmed to seek out other humans to survive. Human touch sees us down-regulate our autonomic nervous system which in turn enables us to overcome the fear and helplessness and fight for our survival with all our smarts on. And yet solo dwellers were denied this primal response during lockdown. Of course, at the same time, isolation itself triggers the flight or fight (anxious) response, which roots us further in the very crisis we are programmed to try to flee. Former US surgeon general Dr Vivek H. Murthy’s book Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World was released just as the US death rate from COVID-19 started to accelerate (Murthy had no inkling it would land in a world of enforced isolation). He wrote: ‘Over millennia, this hypervigilance in response to isolation became embedded in our nervous system to produce the anxiety we associate with loneliness.’ We breathe fast, our heart races, our blood pressure rises and we don’t sleep, all signals to seek connection. Cut off from our urges, those of us who are generally not lonely in our aloneness suddenly feel a horrible kind of severance from, well, life. As Robin Wright, a writer who lives solo in Washington D.C., penned in the New Yorker, ‘As the new pathogen forces us to socially distance . . . Life seems shallower, more like survival than living.’ The upside of such a unique scenario, of course, was that our fundamental need for reconnection was exposed; so too just how removed we’ve become from what matters to us. It held a big fat mirror – nay, a magnifying glass – to so much of where we’d been going wrong. And to all the complex and beautiful paradoxes and uncertainties of the human experience, actually. But we’ll get to that shortly. Of course many in our community who are wholly disenfranchised – the homeless, elderly, the underemployed, new parents, the mentally unwell – suffer terribly from lack of human contact RETAIL PHARMACY ASSISTANTS • NOV 2020 BOOK EXCERPT 39 This One Wild and Precious Life by Sarah Wilson, Published by Macmillan Australia, RRP $34.99.