As independent sentient beings, we like to think we are all that and a bag of chips. One human is the basic unit of intelligent life, and most of our mental and physical health systems are based on this assumption.
But what if that's not true? What if between humans, communicated through touch and other forms of human communication, their is a higher unit of life?
Aren't we denying the power of touch? Aren't we isolating ourselves, and creating a culture of fear around touch with the next generation?
What if we need touch? What if the power of touch is much like the spark of life? Igniting and combining us into something more than the sum of our observable parts?
We recognize marriages, hopefully of any stripe or gender combination, as unions between two people who sometimes also create or adopt children to create a family, the next level of social organism we often see empowered and supported.
Yet beyond "the family," what kind of social organism's are left in modern America? The church or community may exist, but not in the same contexts or number of lives as before.
By letting the word "family" also come to mean one person, alone and isolated, untouched and untouching, haven't we denied something very basic in our nature?
We need to touch, to know our power. We need to be touched, to know the power of other.
And in between, I think we are lurching towards something spectacularly more.
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