Meditations #37

 A branch severed from an adjoining branch necessarily becomes severed from the whole tree. A man, likewise, who has been divided from any of his fellows has thereby fallen away from the whole community. But whereas the branch is lopped by some other hand, the man, by his feelings of hatred or aversion, brings about his own estrangement from his neighbour, and does not see that at the same time has has cut himself off from the whole framework of society. Nevertheless it is in our power, by grace of Zeus the author of all fellowship, to grow back and become one with our neighbour again, so playing our part once more in the integration of the whole. Yet if such acts of secession are repeated frequently, they make it difficult for the recusant to achieve this reunion and restitution. A branch which has been partner of the tree's growth since the beginning, and has never ceased to share its life, is a different thing from one that has been grafted in again after a severance. As the gardeners say, it is of the same tree, but not of the same mind.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Eleven

Once more Marcus Aurelius reflecting upon the human condition and the need to remember and focus upon the oneness of the human condition - and once again using nature as the fitting metaphor. I guess I'm thinking about this admonition this morning for a couple reasons. One of them I suppose is purely personal. I was strolling through the great idiotic wasteland of Facebook this morning and came across some shared post (those ones which are either generated by a company to get business or as a scam to steal your personal information; in regards to the latter, I'm always amazed by the posts that ask questions like, "What was your first car?" or "What was your favorite pet's name?", when they should just go ahead and ask for your passwords . . . but I digress) which caught my eye. This one asked your favorite memory from high school. I started to type, "When I walked across the stage at graduation and never looked back," which is true but also more than a bit of a self-serving snarky statement, so I didn't write anything. In this way I intentionally cut myself away from the tree, although, geez, it's Indiana, so it's no great loss. Still, it speaks to MA's observation. Of course, if I hadn't made a very deliberate effort to leave I'd potentially be watching FoxNews, voting GOP, and actively supporting the establishment of a racist and theocratic state. Sometimes you did need to cut the branch because the tree is rotten, and hope for a successful graft somewhere else. All of this then brought me back to Facebook and social media where it had begun, and where I actually came back into contact with many of the folks I went to high school with (at least the ones I didn't unfriend because of their very thinly veiled racist or homophobic or Islamophobic statements). The great myth of social media, much like the internet that generated it, was that it would be the instrument that brought us all together or back together. Actually, it does exactly the opposite. The illusion of connection and the reality of isolation and, at times, anonymity, actually pushes us apart and facilitates that separation.