Putting the focus on our dynamic connecting process (rather than our static disconnected state) can also completely alter how we interact with and relate to others. Recognizing the importance of separation, and seeing the opportunity of our gaps, makes it easier to respect the differences that invariably exist between us. We can allow strangers to be “strange” – and not freak out over it. We can appreciate the things that set us apart – not as divisive, corrosive influences that threaten the fabric of society, but as valuable aspects of the wide variety of human manifestations. Our distinctly separate identities become crucially important, and just as we claim our right to be different, to stand apart, to be Other, we can see that everybody else has just as much right as we, to be who and what they are. And in the process of interacting in a way that respects and allows (even welcomes) inevitable distance, both sides can come away with a greater appreciation of who they are, compared to the Other.

A great example of this is a conversation I had with a former Hell’s Angel in September, 2016, while we were both waiting for our cars to be fixed at the dealership. We were hanging out in the waiting room, checking our smartphones and occasionally glancing at the flat-screen television on the far wall. I wasn’t in the mood to talk, that day, but the biker was. He had plenty to say about the upcoming election and the candidates, and it was quickly obvious that we each favored the candidate the other one distrusted (and wished would just go away). He seemed to assume I was squarely on the opposite side from him, although that wasn’t entirely true.

He also had plenty to say about his life and his experience, which was nothing like mine. He’d been a member of an internationally known biker gang. He’d gone to prison for killing a man in a bar fight. He had several children by a number of women, some of whom had been his wives. He was deeply religious in certain ways, but when I started talking about other sections of the Bible that strictly prohibited things he did (like cutting his hair and getting tattoos), he wasn’t familiar with those passages. He was dismissive and disrespectful of just about everything that mattered to me, and he longed for a return to the “good old days” of “family values”, which sounded great for him, but not so great for me.

We were clearly situated in completely different “quadrants” of life, with our values in sharp contrast to each other. And we actually ended up having a spirited, invigorating discussion. I didn’t fault him for what he was saying. Nor did I criticize him for what he believed. I just listened – and objectively countered some of his most vehement arguments with scriptural references that supported the opposite view. Eventually he backed off on his aggressive criticism and our initially heated conversation gradually got to the point where we’d both stated our cases, we’d both made it clear what we thought about the election, society, where we were going in the world, and what we believed the Bible had to say about it. We each agreed to disagree with 97.95% of what the other one thought – without calling each other names. Frankly, trying to win our little skirmish in the larger culture war would have been a total waste of time. Our life experiences had shaped us too differently, for that to ever happen.

But by the end of our hour-long stay in that waiting room, we were sharing pictures on our smartphones and comparing notes on the weather. Here was a burly, tat-covered former Hell’s Angel, clad in leather and denim with a chain connecting his wallet to a belt loop, showing me – a lesbian high-tech program manager in business casual attire – pictures of cumulonimbus and marveling at how they looked like horses galloping across the sky. He showed me pictures of his bike, his son’s bike, and his grandkids. I showed him pictures of the deer in my back yard. And when the mechanic called me to get my car, there was a connection there. It wasn’t the deepest, most profound connection, but it was definitely enough to bridge the gap that existed between us at the start.

Others are different from us. They should be different. Just as we should be different from them. It’s neither healthy nor realistic to expect everyone to share everyone else’s outlooks, opinions, and values. Life takes too many different turns for so many of us, and the minute you expect people to fall in line with a standard position, regardless of their own life experience and perspectives, you ask them to sacrifice a part of themselves. We’re asked to erase our differences and blend in with the group lots of times, of course, especially in situations where conformity is valued and divergence is feared. But it’s unrealistic, and ultimately it’s unsustainable. Because frankly, we’re just not built to adhere 100% to The Right Way Of Doing/Thinking Things. Plus, more diverse communities are livelier communities, giving us the chance to both reinforce our own identities and find new and different ways to constructively connect with others.

Even so, I don’t think we should ever get too comfortable with separation. Distance is an inevitable part of life, yes, but it’s really most beneficial to us when it drives us to transcend it. Unwelcome awkwardness, even pain, gives us impetus to get outside of ourselves and make the effort to extend our understanding, actions, and capacity. A little anguish can be a lot motivating. It can also be humbling in some pretty useful ways. Think back to the story about you getting caught in the rain on a supposedly sunny day. Or how you lost your job when you thought you were secure for the long-term. The times we come up short push us to do better, the next time around… to pay closer attention… to take more precautions. Rather than denying the importance of distance or resigning ourselves to its inevitable discomfort, we should use it to create something better.

Because it can help us do just that – create something better where we used to think what we had was good enough. It can drive us to rise above an isolated, alienated state with our inherently connecting process. Check the weather more frequently. Keep current with the latest professional trends. Even move from familiar surroundings to a different area with new opportunities and a completely different circle of friends and neighbors. As long as we’re alive, our bodies are involved in an ongoing back-and-forth that’s constantly finding new information and adding it to our understanding, improving our system’s ability to interact with our world. There’s not a single second that goes by, that our systems aren’t in dynamic interaction with our environment. It’s how we’re built. It’s what we do. And once we realize just how innate, instinctive, and normal our inclination to connect truly is, we can extend that to our larger scale world. We don’t have to figure out how to launch that exploring and integrating process. We already know how do it naturally. If you’re reading this (even if you’re not), you’re doing it right now.

Focusing on the connecting process as a natural extension our separate state can transform our relationship with everything – and everyone. It can change how we perceive success and failure, shifting it from a series of binary good/bad outcomes to an ongoing quest for what’s next. It can change a life-changing crisis from an intimidating threat to an opportunity to find out how things turn out. Indeed, it can transform the whole way we live our lives – from fear of what is, to an ongoing flow of growth and movement towards what will be. And we may just find ourselves looking for additional gaps to cross and separations to bridge. Thinking you’re stuck with what just is, is like trying to scale a rock wall without any practice, for the first time ever in your life. But when you see it as a series of chances to find out what’s next, life turns from a daunting sheet of glass with no outcroppings to help you scale it, to a climbing wall dotted with plenty of handholds and footholds to move us along.

In our ongoing dance of far-close–closer-farther, we rely on some types of distances to overcome others. As discussed before, physical distance can give you the time (temporal distance) you need to close a conceptual gap. You see a stranger approaching, and you step back to widen the physical distance and figure out who they are and how you should interact with them. You pause before responding to their greeting, so you can connect the dots of what they just said to you… and come up with a measured response. That time-extended response will probably be “closer” to what you mean, than a blurted reaction, and if you use your physical and temporal distance wisely, it can actually help close the conceptual space and create a positive social connection.

Even with established social connections, separation can help us. Think back to the scene of the Saturday morning emergency. The one person who was best able to make sense of that situation was a newcomer who didn’t make assumptions about what they were seeing. You might think the neighbors who knew that elderly woman best would be better at helping her. An outsider was able to respond more effectively than longtime acquaintances who jumped to conclusions based on their conditioned perceptions. It wasn’t separation that fed the confusion – it was the mistaken perception of connection. Likewise, when the neighbors realized that there was a serious gap between reality and what they thought was happening, they jumped into action and helped. The dynamic interplay of separate state and connecting process moves us forward, just as two neighbors reached out to connect with the elderly woman in crisis and others went to intercept the emergency vehicles

Venturing into the void of the social unknown can be scary stuff, and every new encounter with a stranger, every start to an unfamiliar process, is a step into that void. To do that comfortably, we need to have a solid sense of our own identity, a clear sense of where we fit. Our separateness from others, our autonomy, our individuality, offers us a firm foundation, like a stable boardwalk winding through a swampy bog. We rely on the firmness of our own identity, our own self-awareness, our own individuality within a larger but distinct community which makes us us, in the midst of an often mucky, treacherous world. That sense of individual autonomy and communal belonging is only possible if we separate ourselves from others (and the world around us). As many a teenager can attest, we need to feel separate, we need to be other, in order to comfortably connect with the rest of the world. Our cultural exchanges mean nothing, if we don’t have distinct customs to compare and contrast.

And yet, distance still bothers us. It’s an irritant. It’s intimidating. No matter how convinced we are that our systems are naturally riddled with gaps, no matter how well we understand the limitations of our perceptions, no matter how aware we are of our prejudices and biases, the idea of disunity still makes us nervous. And so it should. We’ve seen the harm it does to marginalized populations with its “-isms”. We’ve seen the toll taken by cutting some in on the bounty, while pushing others away. We all know the pain of separation from loved ones, the safety of friends and family, or the larger purpose of the community. Why would we ever want to get used to that?

Because it compels us to connect. Just as light is both a particle and a wave, so is our system comprised of both a state of separation and a process of connection. And if we get too comfortable with one at the expense of the other, failing to appreciate the advantages of the other, we lose out on the incredible potential of that dynamic interplay.

Loving the Distance

But separation isn’t just useful as something to overcome. It’s also valuable in and of itself. As discussed before, we need our distance in its various forms, for it creates the individual and communal identities which let us feel safe when we engage across the gaps.

At the most basic level, we are literally separate physiological beings from other people. And in this sense, separateness is not our enemy at all, but our ally. We don’t share the same bodies, we don’t share the exact same space. We may be in close proximity, and we may even be in intimate physical contact, but as we discussed earlier, that “direct” connection is a comforting illusion. We’re separated by trillions of gaps within, including the gap(s) without. But in order to have that experience of connection with another – even an illusory one – we need to be separate autonomous individuals. You can’t be physically intimate with another person, if you don’t have a body of your own. And you can’t participate fully in the world, unless you have a distinct and separate body and mind, with which you connect to others.

Separation isn’t just a precursor to connection. It’s often a prerequisite.

But we don’t just go through this process in the privacy of our own neurology. Our personal lives are extended exercises in bridging gaps between ourselves and others. You move into a new neighborhood or start a new job, and the first thing you do is to get your bearings. You figure out who’s who, what’s what, and how to make the most of it. An electrical charge that’s reached a presynaptic terminal, doesn’t stall and say, “Oh, too bad – there’s no immediate way across.” And neither do you. Rather, you engage with the impromptu visits from new neighbors, the questions of new co-workers as a normal (and welcome) sending and receiving of interpersonal signals that connects you with others in a network that’s every bit as dynamic as the signaling in your nerve cells.

And so we enrich our lives. It may feel scary and intimidating to confront the unknown, but there’s also an air of excitement… the invigoration of discovery. Crossing the gaps of time and space and meaning changes us. Just as our experience can be altered by whether our neurotransmitters are received, rejected, and/or recycled, our lives are changed by the journey from not-knowing to knowing, from here to there, from one sort of being or doing to another.

Leaping into a gap to find our place is something we do regularly by design. Career paths, education, getting to know other people, working towards a desired outcome, are all examples of closing gaps, which we do on a regular basis. You know you need a new job, but you’re not sure where to find it. So, you dive into the gap left by the job you left, like a neurotransmitter diffusing across the synaptic cleft. You actively go looking, surveying classifieds and online job boards, talking to recruiters and hiring managers, as your perspective changes and your direction course-corrects. Eventually you settle on the path you’ll follow, and like a tiny molecule docking on a post-synaptic receptor, a way opens, and you continue your career trajectory.

Formal education (learning anything, really) is another common exercise in closing the conceptual gaps between not-knowing something and knowing it well (or well enough). Informally gathering information of any kind is another aspect. We gossip, read the news, follow social media feeds. You could even say the whole social media phenomenon is only possible because of our insatiable need to close the conceptual gap between not-knowing and knowing. Would we even need Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, if we didn’t feel like we were separated from each other? Would our eyes be glued to our phone screens as we check our timelines and news feeds, if we didn’t feel like we might miss out on what’s happening in the world at large? We get tremendous satisfaction from being in-the-know and finding out stuff we never saw or heard or knew before – or never realized we needed to know.

From schooling to following a career path to wasting time on Facebook, our entire lifespan is comprised of a long series of connections. Friends, family, foes… Job offers, raises, lateral moves, promotions… News, informational tidbits, skills… They all draw us along, irresistibly pulling us towards some distant state of being / doing / knowing. Just as our neurotransmitters are continuously leaping into the void to connect with a relatively distant destination, we venture again and again into the unknown to learn something new, to connect with a new person or experience, to get us from where we are, to where we want to go. We don’t think anything of it. It’s just what we do. It’s who we are. And it comes so naturally to us, that people who do not do it are viewed askance, as though something is wrong with them. Indeed, the DSM has made plenty of space for them in its successive tomes.

What makes our connecting activity so tantalizing is the gap – the space we need to cross. That gap is useful… invigorating. It can be scary. It doesn’t feel safe. We don’t like feeling disconnected or alone. So, we reach out. We extend. We push to make contact – even if the pushing is uncomfortable, and the outcome is unsure. Our dread of separation piques our urge to transcend it, and invites us to draw closer to what is distant. If that gap weren’t there… if we immediately connected the dots in every single aspect of our lives… if we instantly recognized every single person we encountered or understood exactly what was required of us in every single situation… we’d have that much less impetus to venture into the unknown, beyond our comfort zone, and extend ourselves in ways that force us to grow… To change… To become something other (and perhaps better) than before.

Not all the changes are easy, of course, and the end results often leave a lot to be desired. Sensing, perceiving, and figuring out what it all means is an imperfect process at every level of our human lives. We disagree. Sometimes violently. Our understanding of others comes up short, and we act on flawed assumptions, producing pain all around. But if we were all “wired” directly in ways that produced exactly the same experiences and exactly the same interpretations of perceptions, our world would be a drab series of redundancies, none of which would stand out as particularly interesting or inviting. None of us would stand out as particularly interesting, even to ourselves. Everyone would be the same. Everything would be uniform.

How boring. How life-suckingly boring.