“How does it work?”
“How does what work??
“Life.”
“Really now, I’m supposed to know that!”
“Yeah — you are.”
“Well, if I had to say, at this odd and slightly confusingly clear moment in time, it seems to me that life works kind of like legos.”
“What? Really? Legos? Aren’t legos kind of for little kids, and maybe losing ground to tablets?”
“Well, not yet, but I suppose the snappy things come and go, model cars and planes, Erector sets, various kinds of building blocks and jigsaw puzzles, but our fascination with connection, with making connections, that’s life. Think Facebook, Instagram,Twitter, Starbucks, teams, school, friends, church, family, true love — we want to connect, meet, exchange, belong, be friends, be family, snap on.”
“So, what do we do with that?”
“Well, if we are already a part of a team, a club, a business, a school, a church, a nonprofit, a friendship circle, a family, and we want to do life well, then we should lead in creating more snap on points, more ways for people to bridge over their loneliness and meet and talk, honestly, to lego-up and build something cool, fun, fascinating, big and colorful, together. That’s what people want. They want to fit, to bridge, to snap, on, and be part off something bigger than a small plastic piece of themselves. They want a buddy. They want a mentor. They want a cousin. They want a brother. They want a spouse. They want a teacher. They want a dad. They want a mom, or something even remotely like one, someone, anyone, who brakes the silence and listens and … connects.”
“That’s a challenge!”
“Why?”
“So many of us, these days, seem to be shy, hurt, burned, distracted, overwhelmed, busy, awkward and most of all — afraid, of each other.”
“That’s true, but if we don’t go there, to those real points of connection, then we are just left with a life of tiny lonely pieces, psychic fragments, small isolated, island lives, little junked up materialistic silos. If we don’t connect, we’ll be like sand grains lost in big shoes, dust particles floating in the great airy expanses over the deserts. We will be some weird kind of modern R. W. Emerson, self-reliance with earphones on, lonely iron strings playing one note, social hermits with our heads bent down permanently over our smart phones. Someone must, if we are going to live well, really do life well, connect us.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“Look up, out of the trench. See people. Regain social ground. Discover again the lost art of hospitality. Invite a lego to play, to dinner, to coffee, to study, to hang out, to bridge time and space and connect face-to-face, not text-to-text, not screen-to-screen, not pic-to-pic, but up close and warmly personal. Actually have relationships, and facilitate them between other people. Go be that engineer of sociality, the socio-lego-land creator, that infra-face-structure designer, for them, now, please, will you?”
“Okay, I’ll get right on that!”
“Thanks!”
“No, thank you, really! I’ve been kinda lonely lately.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Thrive! 