#5: Only Connect

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at it’s height. Live in fragments no longer.”
– E.M Forster, Howards end

Only connect. Live in fragments no longer. This could be the purest distillation of my project.

I’ve been trying to imagine what kind of end result I want to achieve. I’ve been struggling with thoughts of how I will plan to monetise it, burdening this poor little flame of an idea with the pressure of supporting myself and my family for the coming decades. But of course I see the folly of this approach, I can hear my tutors in my head telling me not to fall in love with the solution before I have defined the problem. The first step I have to take in my What?-Why?-How?-What If? project is to clearly identify the subject area I want to work in and the research question I want to work with.

I was pondering today and I concluded that the clearest element I can boil it all down to is that of connection. We suffer in our minds because we are disconnected from our selves and from other people, our societies suffer because strangers mistrust each other, judge each other, we have become polarised. Our impoverished ability to connect is also destroying our environment, I heard a podcast today with the primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall and she mentioned this problem;

“So here we are, with this intellect that’s enabled us to do something very different from all the animal successes, and that’s design a rocket, for example, that went up to Mars…And bizarre, isn’t it, that the most intellectual creature, surely, that’s ever lived on the planet, is destroying its only home. And I always believe it’s because there’s a disconnect between that clever, clever brain and human heart, love and compassion. I truly believe, only when head and heart work in harmony can we attain our true human potential.” Jane Goodall speaking on the On Being Podcast.

So there I was, pondering all these points, settling on the idea of connection, and when I got home, I went to YouTube and this was the first video I found, posted only yesterday…

So I’m taking this coincidence as an affirmation that I’ve struck upon the right path, and I can envisage an early draft of my research question being something along the lines of…

“How can we create and facilitate human connection in order to engender a better state of mental health?”

I am tempted to add something along the lines of “How can we help people lead more meaningful lives?” But I sense that question is far too subjective and hard to achieve or quantify, so my gut tells me to stay away and leave it to be implied and discovered in the outcome.

From this question I can imagine looking into the practises of faith and religion, to the techniques of therapy, of storytelling, theatre, music, all the things I’m interested in. And if I force myself to imagine an outcome, I could vaguely perceive some kind of Museum of Connection, a Connexhibition, or a Wonder Workshop, where people come to experience some kind of method of connection, to share stories, offer support to each other, or to just play and rekindle a sense of magic in how they see the world. A workshop of Numinous Reciprocity. That sounds exciting.