Essential

We’ve had to think a lot, over the past couple months, about what is “essential” and what is real.

As it turns out, CEOs are not essential, but grocery clerks are. Wall street bankers are not essential, but truck drivers are. Politicians are not essential, but epidemiologists are. Wars are not essential, but social services are. Restaurants are not essential, but food is. Realtors aren’t essential, but housing is. Clothing stores aren’t essential, but seamstresses who can make a mask are. Haircuts aren’t essential, but hospice care is. Physically showing up at a church or a bar or a stadium is not essential, but fellowship is. Travel to other countries isn’t essential, but leaving the house to walk around and exercise is. Many of our jobs are not essential, but having the means to get food and shelter is.

We’ve seen that “the economy” is a fiction that we’ve shared for ages because it was a more convenient way than bartering to keep track of who owes favors to whom. “The economy” isn’t real. Food is real, and starvation is real if you don’t have food. Viruses are real, and they will really eat your living lungs given an opportunity. Friends and family and neighbors helping each other in an emergency is real. People providing necessary goods and services to each other is real. Pieces of paper being used to measure whether an individual has worked hard enough to deserve food and shelter – that’s not real. And the holes in the story of “the economy” are now threatening to unravel every structure that human society has built around it, now that it doesn’t work anymore.

And death is real. It’s the one reality that everyone must confront sooner or later, no matter who we are, what we believe, or what we do.

And because death is real, the single most essential reality while we strive to delay its coming is this:

Human beings need each other.

We need each other for survival, and we need each other for comfort, and we need each other’s touch, and we need each other for meaning and purpose, and we need each other for beauty and art and music and poetry and laughter and love and being fully human. We need each other’s strengths to compensate for our weaknesses. We need each other’s knowledge to compensate for the areas where we as individuals are ignorant. We need each other to make difficult, even sacrificial, choices to keep each other alive and healthy. 

Most of all, we need each other to be fully ourselves.

That is real. That is essential. Everything else is a distraction.