Why do we feel alone in a crowd?...
Digital Desk: Alone amongst family -members? Alone in company?
Research shows how much our existence craves for connection.
Yet this connection is so hard to come by, much less easy to maintain.
Right from teenage when a sense of identity dawns upon us, we start looking out for people to belong to, apart from the biological ones.
We look for like-minded friends, with whom to hang out, share our concerns, seek for solutions.
And once we locate a semblance of that connection, we intuitively realize how significant it is, and as such, begin to fiercely guard that connection.
A few individuals who stick together try to guard the boundary of that group so as to not let the collective values get diluted by addition of ‘others’
Which brings us back to the problem that we started with.
The issue of alienation. Of pushing people away, who do not ‘belong’ to us.
Our craze to belong makes us go all out to belong. And to protect that group from seeming ‘outsiders’
I daresay most people from Assam have faced some sort of this ‘othering’ when they go to live and work outside the state.
“Oh, so you are from Assam? which language do you speak? Is it Asami?”
Veiled attacks on our cuisine are thrown out in a seemingly innocuous manner, “Wow, your skin is so good. Must be because of the boiled food you eat.”
Such examples can be multiplied ad infinitum.
The way out of this vicious cycle lies in the golden value of empathy.
If I am able to step into the shoes of the person next to me, our human experience would have too much in common for any barriers to come up between us.
Be it any age, any gender, race, caste, creed, community- we are all one in the essential experience of life. Sorrow, happiness, loss, love, characterize all our lives.
Thus, if only we look beyond the differences, the ‘otherness’ of others- we will all bond beautifully and we will all flourish with the golden glow that human connection bequeaths.
(The writer is a Senior Soft Skills trainer and can be reached at atifa@comeaspire.net)
-Atifa Deshamukhya
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