How is it we can forget how connected we are to others and how much our lives depend on strangers?

Last month, when we were lying in side-by-side beds in room 215 of Hospital Metropolitano in Quito, Ecuador the truth of that reality was inarguable. In just a few hours, we had shifted from tourists on the way to the Galapagos to patients of Dr. Jose Vacas.

With his quiet demeanor and dark pin-striped suit, Dr. Vacas, a man we had never met, took charge of our bodies and our lives. Our situation was not life-threatening but could have become so quickly. “Your husband is sicker than you are,” he explained. “He is very dry.” Blair had had diarrhea and nausea for 14 hours when we got to the emergency room. Rita’s problems were only five hours in process.

"I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

- Tennessee Williams,
Streetcar Named Desire

The nurses started IV fluids, antibiotics and anti-nausea medications. There was nothing to do but surrender, with gratitude, to the kindness of these strangers, and there were many of them over the two nights in the hospital.

Residents, nurses, cleaning women, people who, in the prescribed time, brought trays of soft food; the TV technician who managed to get sound out of the TV.

There were the tour representatives who got us into and out of the hospital and checked on us while we were there. There was the Swissotel staff who laundered our clothes and sent up plates of mashed potatoes and rice once we were back at the hotel.

The Galapagos will have to wait for our visit until another time, but we came away with memories that are perhaps more important than any we would have had from our encounters with Giant Land Iguanas. We brought home a renewed knowledge of how connected we all are and, ultimately, how little our survival is dependent on ourselves, alone.

Belonging to Everything

David Whyte, author of Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, worked for a while as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos. He and a fellow guide were once nearly killed when a freak wave swept them off a lava cliff. Of the experience, he writes:

“I lay on the landing beach with a deep pain running through my stomach. I had been struck to the core, as if my insides had been rearranged, as if touched by a god in a Greek drama. In the old Greek stories depicting fleeting encounters with divinity, the touch of a god was always experienced as both violation and blessing.

"The violation was in my stomach—someone had reached inside me and in no uncertain terms informed me that I was like everything else in the world, I had no immunity. The blessing came in an unconscious physical respect for the sea that began to inform everything I did around the boats, from the merest tying of a knot to the safety of every individual and group in my care.

“The blessing was also in sheer survival...I felt I had been given the sight of my own end and had returned to carry the revelations into the rest of my existence. This notion of my own vulnerability had something to do with belonging to the world like everything and everybody else. I was not a discrete star in the firmament of my own adulation. I belonged to everything, and everything had its own life equal to my own, and its own ending.”

Whyte’s experience, and ours, may have had more drama than other stories of interdependence, but they are not different. Each day, all over the planet, we are all dependent on the service and compassion of others. Every hospital is staffed with people who help strangers survive. Every airplane has a crew upon whom our lives depend during the hours we are above the earth.

Sometimes it’s helpful, especially in the lonely hours, to reflect on how our lives are supported by others—by the people who refine the gasoline we pump into our cars, by the farmers who grow the food we pick up and eat hurriedly on the way to the office, the sanitation workers who hoist our reeking garbage cans on the trucks and drive them far from sight and smell.

It can keep you awake quite a while, trying to remember and give thanks for each person—or group of people—who has helped your life in just one day. It can also ease the chill of loneliness. Thinking of our ties with others does more than make us feel connected to them. It literally changes our physical connections as well.

Resculpting the Brain

Quantum physics recognizes the power of mental effort and mindfulness to alter neuronal connections. Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, research professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine, has demonstrated the power of “top-down” plasticity to resculpt the brain. It is the power of the mind to alter brain circuitry by mental effort and refocusing.

Schwartz’s program is designed to change the brain chemistry to patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorders by training them to refocus, using a positive mantra, meditative prayer, or repetitive phrase. What this technique does is to break up “brain lock,” the compulsive repeating, self-downing or self-defeating thoughts or behavior.

In depressives, the pattern is called “depression interlock.” It is as if the person’s brain is stuck in a gear that keeps the striatum using the same output pathway to the thalamus, regardless of how excitatory and upsetting it is. By refocusing, shifting attention or sheer mental effort, a second, more quiescent pathway is taken to the thalamus, a major player in the limbic brain just above the amygdala.

‘Conatus’

In his book, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, Antonio Damasio, professor and head of neurology at the University of Iowa Medical Center, says that conatus, “the essence of our beings [is] called into action when we are confronted with the reality of suffering and especially the reality of death, our own or that of those we love.”

When we fall seriously ill, whether in a foreign hospital or in our own beds, suffering becomes very real indeed. It is when we are forced by circumstance to draw into ourselves, pain contracting our worlds.

It is also an opportunity to feel our connections with all who suffer from our particular malady or any suffering of mind, body, and spirit. Such a remembrance breaks the “brain lock” of self-absorption. Our physical pain may not measurably ease but our suffering is sure to lessen. We feel less alone because we are less alone, merely by thinking of those who suffer as we do and of the countless beings who care for them—and us.

Last Updated: 6-27-2005

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