I love connection. It makes me feel alive and it reminds me yet again that the world is so much bigger than whatever problem my head was focusing on prior to connecting.I had coffee the other day with a beautiful woman and friend to Phillip and myself. We sat in an urban coffee shop on one of the quaint side streets of the West Village and talked about matters of the heart, from passionate dreams to vulnerable seasons of life. I came away feeling alive and inspired, full of hope for the change I want to see in the world.Relating to another human, feeling heard and seen, understood by them, does something for our hearts and minds that no caffeine fix, night on the town or drug high can even slightly measure up to. The topic of conversation veered onto that of addiction as we sipped on steaming cups of tea and coffee, finding similarities in aspects of our past. We had both encountered, and been affected by, people close to us that had struggled with addiction. It seems to be becoming more and more common for someone we know, if not ourselves, to have a hook of dependance on something, whether it be a drug, pattern of behavior or area of control. My friend shared her experience and I nodded with understanding. Her world had been shaken by someone wrestling with sexual addiction and she had been navigating through healing since then.Later that evening I sat reading an article about the probable cause of addiction following one man’s dedicated research around the world to try and answer the question, “why?” The author, Johann Hari, has also written a book about the whole topic but the article is a fascinating first glimpse into the idea that
‘the opposite of addiction is not sobriety; it is human connection’.
Professor Peter Cohen, who is quoted in these findings, argues that, ‘If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find — the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe…A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn’t bond as fully with anything else.’This idea that we could see an end to the torturing cycle of addiction simply by connecting people together, building community, is so beautiful and revolutionary to me. Rather than focusing on trying to constantly disconnect people from their unhealthy crutches, maybe we should be purely trying to reconnect them with themselves and into relationships. If I even go half a day without some meaningful human connection, my world starts to feel a little grey and I’ll want to binge watch Netflix and drink copious amounts of tea to make up for it. Imagine living like that for years or even a whole lifetime!Phillip and I are passionate about building community. Even before we were dating, one of our earliest conversations as friends involved talking about our heart for building family around us and always having a home that is open to anyone. Now married, it’s something that we still talk a lot about and have been dreaming for the past year as to how we can make that happen.Last Sunday that dream began to come true. We had invited a few friends over for lunch to help welcome a couple of new people to the city. It hadn’t felt like anything unusual or different before hand but as the day went on and people were still contentedly enjoying each other’s company, sat around our large wooden table, we realised how significant this was. Community was happening. Connection was taking place. Family was being created. For nine hours straight, people from four different nations had sat together talking, laughing, dreaming, eating and drinking and it felt like no time at all. By the end of the night we had decided to make it official and begin hosting weekly Sunday potlucks for our NYC family.I wonder, how connected do you feel today? Are you in need of some quality community time too? Or maybe you're actually the key to creating that environment around you and all you need to do is say, 'welcome'.You are not crazy for wanting to be with people and there is nothing wrong with you for feeling alone. We were made for connection. We were crafted for intimacy. We were born this way. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y51YETlzgU[/embed]
