The Space Between Us

Understanding Connection in a Vast, Isolated World

I think about how far we are from each other: both spatially and emotionally speaking. There are around 8 billion people on the planet- something I can barely comprehend myself- and you are fortunate if you meet a couple hundred in your lifetime. To me that’s crazy. There are people halfway around the world who are going to sleep, waking up, eating- doing the same exact things that we do- and we’ll never meet or even think of each other. This place is big, and sometimes it feels bigger.

On some macro level, we are merely blobs on a ball floating in orbit around other balls for what seems to be indefinitely. When thought of like this, you realize how small we truly are. How that, although we create, live, die, hurt, and love with all of our hearts- nothing we do has any valid purpose. Zooming inwards to us on an individual level, we realize how we actually aren’t alone. We are constantly surrounding ourselves with things (intangible and not) that hold and ground us in our reality. I know that I’m not alone just due to the fact there’s a woman behind me eating a sandwich. Now I can’t connect with her over that and call it “my experience” or “my sandwich”, but it’s that shared experience that brings us one step closer to one another. In some ways we aren’t those metaphorical blobs merely floating. Just because we connect, create, and relate we are more.

Humans have worked together as a way to connect since we’ve established ourselves as beings. This is the beauty of humanity, our ability to make. Over the process of creating, we work, adapt, and build deeper connections, establishing us through the work that we do. I think that’s why I gravitate towards the arts. It is so difficult, especially in the performing arts, to work independently. Our work relies on one another not just to create the end result, but also to uphold our part of the process. One cannot happen without the other. When you step back and see all your combined work performed out in front of you. You realize you are able to captivate yourself and those watching, creating a connection through a shared experience. For those fleeting moments, you are connected to the people around you. When it's over, you part, maybe to never run into those people except for in that space.

I think the problem is: we don’t come together any more.

We are so wrapped up in our own worlds that we feel confined to the cell of our own making. When we step into a room with our peers, the ones we truly love, we light up forgetting our spiral of solitude. Because our American society is so focused on the individual: pulling YOURSELF up by the bootstraps, we forget that the people and world around us are there to catch us and guide us to success.